


twilightish

by aibari



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Parenting, Depression, Enemies to Lovers, Family Issues, Grief, M/M, Murder Mystery, Nightmares, Off-Screen Murder, a reasonable amount of peril, canon typical worms, negative self-talk, one dead cow, parent death (discussed), tim and sasha are the greek chorus of this fic, yes. it's time. for the twilight au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 23,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26252383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aibari/pseuds/aibari
Summary: After his mum dies, Martin moves to live with his father. He gets more vampires than he'd counted on.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 75
Kudos: 129
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been a long time in the making! I have some ideas that might make it into a future sequel, but for now I'm just sitting here, full of vampire feelings, hoping you'll have some vampire feelings about this, too. Somehow it ended up both more and less serious than I intended it to.
> 
> Art is by the lovely and incredibly talented Endly - you can find her @endlydraws on [tumblr](https://endlydraws.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/Endlydraws)!
> 
> Thanks to B for the read-through and Very Good Plot Thoughts, Liz for some good vampire/tma talks, and Triffid for answering my questions about the british school system. This fic is not very accurate in that last respect, but I promise that's all me.
> 
> Happy reading!

Martin slung the bag over his shoulder and got off the bus.

The stop was an empty patch of gravel on the side of the road. There was a tall lamp post with a bus schedule attached to it, and trees crowding in on the road, leaves hanging yellow and green like a veil over the asphalt, and then a whole lot of nothing in either direction. Just trees and asphalt and gravel.

And Martin’s dad.

Martin’s dad was there, too. He was leaning against the trunk of one of the trees and smoking a cigarette. His hands were large in the way Martin’s hands were large; in the way Martin’s mother’s hands had not been.

 _Don’t stare,_ Martin told himself, _Jesus, what’s wrong with you._

But it was hard to look away. This was his _dad._ He looked _friendly_ , in a way that made Martin’s stomach turn. He was wearing a soft, woollen sweater and a lumpy, green scarf and a worried expression. He had a soft, pleasant sort of face, the sort of face that Martin was starting to grow into, too.

Martin swallowed convulsively. The bag was digging into his shoulder, and he shifted its weight a little.

“Hello, Martin,” said Martin’s dad with a queasy smile.

“Hi,” Martin said, or tried to. It came out cracked in the middle.

“How was your trip?” Martin’s dad asked.

Martin shrugged, and then caught himself.

“It was fine,” he said, and made himself smile back.

His dad nodded at his bag. “You alright with that?”

“Yeah,” Martin said. He shifted awkwardly on his feet. “Where are we going?”

“It’s just down the road,” his dad said, and started walking down the road, gravel crunching under his grey rubber boots. “It’s a bit out of the way from people, but I find the quiet’s quite nice.”

Martin stared at his back, the hard set of his shoulders, and wanted to throw up.

It wasn’t too late.

He could just wait here until the next bus showed up, and then …

Then _what?_ He could go back to London, but it wasn’t as though there was anything left for him there.

If he could just keep his head down here, if he could just do his best and not mess things up, he could be out of here in a year or two.

He took a steadying breath.

He followed in his father’s footsteps.

-

There was a gravel road that led into town and a gravel road that led into the woods. They forked together with the path from the bus stop, and on the side of the fork there was a house.

It looked out of place, sitting between the trees like this with no neighbours to speak of, like it had been torn straight out of suburbia and dropped haphazardly into the countryside.

“This is me,” said Martin’s dad. He gave Martin a queasy little smile. “Well, us, now.”

Then he fished out two sets of keys. He gave Martin one of them, and went to unlock the front door with the other.

Martin stared down at the keys. There were three of them, all bright, shiny metal. There was a fob, too, a black leather strap with a football hanging from it. He ran his fingers over the outlines of the ball, feeling foreign to himself.

“That’s, ah, the big one’s the house key,” his dad said from the doorway. “Then the other two are for the garage and the post box.”

“Right,” said Martin, and then, reflexively, helplessly, “thanks.”

His dad gave him a room on the second floor. It had been an office, once; a bed had been hastily crammed into the corner between the desk and a book case filled with spy thrillers about the cold war and coding manuals on C++.

“Had to clean out the office for this,” his dad said, and laughed. “It took all night.”

“Thank you,” Martin said. It sounded dull even to him.

“Well, I’ll, uh, I’ll leave you alone, then,” his dad said. “Let you settle in a bit. Supper’s in an hour.”

Then he left, closing the door behind him.

Martin watched the handle turn, and then sat down heavily on the bed. He sighed.

“Right,” he muttered. He didn’t know what to do. He could unpack, maybe, but.

Well.

Maybe he wasn’t quite ready for it.

Maybe not just yet.

-

He was back at the hospital, sitting stiffly in a chair that was slightly too small to be comfortable. He was sitting and he was watching his mother’s hospital bed, but it was turned so that the only part of her he could really see was her hand, resting skinny and blue-veined on top of the white hospital duvet.

He couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop looking at it, because if he looked away, something terrible was going to happen. Her nails were painted a beige kind of pink, and he couldn’t look away.

He _couldn’t_.

“Martin,” she said. He twisted in his seat, trying to see her face, but there was a cloud in the way, soft and pale grey and spreading slowly outwards.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked, leaning forward. The edge of the chair dug into his thighs.

“Martin,” she said again, gently. The fingers twitched against the duvet. “Everyone will always leave you.”

Then he woke up.

It was dark outside. Martin fumbled for his phone. His heart was pounding in his throat. The clock on his phone read 4.32.

Right.

It was early, but he could already tell he wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep.

He got out of bed instead, and down the hall and out of the house.

It was dark outside. The wet grass hit him in the shins as he walked. The gravel of the path crunched underfoot. He had one earplug in, softly playing _Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band_. He took a deep, steadying breath. The air was different here, cleaner and wetter and muddier all at once.

He wasn’t much of a jogger, so he didn’t really _jog_ , settling instead for a brisk, sharp walk. The _crunch crunch crunch_ of the gravel and the rhythm of the music came together all at once, and it made the jagged, barbed-wire knot in his chest ease up a little.

Right.

_Right._

This wasn’t all bad. The area seemed nice. His dad … seemed like he was trying, which was more than he’d expected, to be honest. It didn’t seem like he was in danger of being thrown out yet, anyway. He had a room and there was food in the fridge and he wouldn’t have to drop out to –

He wouldn’t have to drop out.

That was. That was good. And maybe his dad would expect him to, to make himself more useful later, but he could do that. He could be useful. He _liked_ being useful.

Maybe he could even like being useful to his dad.

He thought he could manage it. Maybe. If his dad kept not being awful and Martin didn’t think about the whole … ten years he’d abandoned them for.

Martin’s stomach twisted sharply.

He walked a little faster.

It was dark, but there were lamp posts along the path, spilling pale and tinny light in evenly spaced circles onto the gravel. And it was easy, somehow, to get lost in the music, in the quiet crunch of walking.

He didn’t see the cow until he was almost on top of it.

It was dead.

He could tell that much immediately. No animal could live without a throat, and this one was missing more than that. Martin fought down a wave of nausea. The body of the cow was lying right in the middle of the light of one of the lamp posts, awkwardly spotlighted.

There was just a lot of … viscera.

He swallowed convulsively.

Right. Okay.

The smell of copper blood hung faintly in the air, and … something else, underneath, waiting to blossom into full putrefaction. There were a couple of flies. There didn’t seem to be enough blood.

Not that Martin _wanted_ there to be blood, exactly. It just seemed like there should be more. And –

There were tracks in the grass, like someone had dragged the carcass here.

Like they’d wanted it to be found like this.

Animals didn’t do that.

Martin suppressed a shudder. He felt suddenly exposed.

“Time to go home,” he told himself, quietly but firmly. His phone was still playing music, and it added another layer of unreality to everything, made it harder to hear what was happening around him. Not that there was anything to hear.

Probably.

Hopefully.

He turned the music off.

It was pretty quiet, other than the low murmur of insects in the wayside, on the carcass in front of him. The beating of his own heart, just a bit too loud in his ears.

And the crunch of gravel, coming from behind him.

He forced himself to turn around.

Someone was walking down the path toward him. He was tall like a scarecrow and thin like a rail, and he was wearing a coat that looked like it cost more than Martin spent on clothes in a year. As he came closer, the light of the street lamp fell across his face.

His _face_.

He had the sort of face people wrote poems about.

Martin’s breath caught in his throat like it had been glued there.

The stranger slowed, and then stopped in front of him. He stared at the cow, mouth hanging half open. His eyes were the colour of rust, dark like what Martin imagined the inside of a dust storm must look like. It was hard to look away.

The stranger frowned at him.

“I, uh, I didn’t do it,” Martin said. His mouth was dry.

The guy’s eyes narrowed even further. “Right,” he said, like Martin had just said something incredibly stupid, which was fair.

His voice sent a shiver down Martin’s spine, which was worse.

Their eyes met, and the moment seemed to stretch out between them like taffy.

Then, as though he’d come to some sort of decision, the stranger turned on his heel and stalked away back where he’d come from.

Martin stared after him.

_What the hell was that?_


	2. Chapter Two

Martin’s dad drove him to school.

“This is just for today,” he said, in the same awkward, apologetic way he said everything now, idling outside the school gates. “Tomorrow, you’re going to have to take the bus, I’m afraid, but –”

“That’s fine,” Martin said. He didn’t mind taking the bus. He minded it much less than this. “I took the bus all the time back home.”

“Okay, then,” his dad said. He went quiet.

“I should probably get inside,” Martin said, smiling at him. “Don’t want to be late on my first day, you know?”

“Right, of course,” his dad said. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. They were blunt like Martin’s, but his nails looked better. Martin kept biting his, which was embarrassing. Just a bad, embarrassing habit he hadn’t been able to quit.

Maybe he could reinvent himself here.

Maybe -

“… by the Deputy Head office first to pick up your schedule,” his dad was saying.

“Yeah, okay,” Martin said. He opened the car door. “Have a nice day.”

“I’ll come and pick you up.”

“That’s okay,” Martin said. “I’ll have to figure out how to get home with the bus sooner or later.”

“Well,” his dad said uncertainly. “If you’re sure?”

“Yeah,” Martin said. “Yeah, I am.”

-

He picked up his schedule and then found himself in Mathematics. The teacher introduced him to the rest of the class, and then told him to go sit down in an empty seat by the wall in the middle of the room.

The girl sitting next to him was wearing a blazer with the arms rolled up and a serious, earnest expression. Her curly, red hair was pulled into a low ponytail.

"Helen Richardson," she said, reaching out a hand to shake.

"Martin Blackwood," said Martin, and immediately felt like an idiot. She knew that. Of course she knew what his name was, the teacher had just told the entire room.

She didn't point it out, though. Instead, she shook his hand and smiled. "Hello, Martin," she said. "I can lend you my notes if you need help catching up."

"Thank you," Martin said, trying not to sound too pathetically grateful.

-

Then it was lunch. He bought a cheese sandwich and a bag of crisps for his dad’s money at the cafeteria and had too much left over afterwards. He didn’t know what to feel about it, so instead he stood in front of the lunch lady for too long after paying, awkwardly stuffing cash back into his wallet and apologising while a queue formed behind him.

Finally, he turned around and went to find a place to sit, but even though there were a lot of tables to sit at, they were all full of people, eating and laughing and talking to each other. He didn’t know-

"Hey, new guy!" someone yelled from his left.

Martin startled, nearly dropping his lunch tray.

A boy and a girl were waving at him from a corner table, beckoning him closer. He recognised them vaguely from Math class.

He didn't know what else to do, so he went.

"Martin, right?" said the boy, reaching over the table to enthusiastically shake Martin's hand. "I'm Tim. Tim Stoker."

"Hi?"

"Don't worry," said the girl. "He won't bite."

Martin laughed awkwardly. “I mean, are you sure?”

Tim gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Not unless you ask, Marto my guy. Why don’t you sit down?”

Martin sat down.

“I’m Sasha, by the way,” Sasha said. She flipped her long, dark hair over her shoulder, and then fixed him with an unnervingly intent look. For a moment it felt as though her glasses were giving her x-ray vision. “Where’d you come from?”

“London,” said Martin vaguely. “It’s, um, I’m really liking the town so far? There are so many trees compared to what I’m used to, I mean, I went for a walk this morning and it was really just lovely.”

Sasha’s eyes narrowed just a fraction, like she knew exactly what he was doing, and then smiled. “Yeah, there are some pretty good hiking paths in the area if you’re interested.” She laughed. “I mean _I’m_ not really but if you ask Tim - ”

“Did someone say hiking?” Tim leaned in close, grinning hugely, dark eyes bright. He really was quite handsome, Martin thought, and then shut the lid firmly on that thought.

“I haven’t really _done_ hiking,” he said instead. “I mean, London isn’t really … I mean, sometimes I’d go for a walk in the park? But that’s not really a _hike_ , obviously, it’s a bit too,” he made a vague motion with his hands and immediately regretted it. “It’s a bit too _flat_.”

Tim laughed. “Don’t worry, young padawan, we’ll make a hiker out of you yet.”

“And if you need to be rescued,” said Sasha in a stage whisper, “you can always text me.”

“ _Hey!_ ” Tim said, and pointed an accusatory baby carrot at her. “I’ll have you know I can be very beginner friendly!”

“He really can’t,” Sasha told Martin. “This summer he did some part time work for the Cub Scouts and lost half the group on the Overfield trail.”

“Only three out of twelve,” Tim protested. “That’s still a passing grade.”

“Not sure they grade on the Bell curve when it’s kids,” Sasha said, grinning.

Martin grinned into his sandwich. It felt _nice_ , being around people, even if he wasn’t quite _part_ of them yet.

“By the way, Martin,” Sasha began, but a sudden hush fell over the room.

A small group of students were walking through the student body.

There were four of them, two boys and two girls, and even though they looked different, they all had the same intimidating sharpness to them.

The girls looked like reverse images of each other. One was tall and pale, with long, brown hair. The other was short and dark, and her hair was bright, silvery white.

One of the boys was gigantic. His long hair curled wildly around his face. Even inside, it looked like it was moving, like there was a slight breeze coming in from somewhere. He was smiling. It looked kind and cruel at the same time, like two images superimposed on top of each other.

The other boy was -

Was the stranger from last night.

_Oh._

Martin swallowed convulsively. His gut was twisting up in knots and his brain was blanking and he was going to school with a stupidly hot guy who had come across him just kind of, kind of casually _hanging out_ with a dead cow? A guy who was apparently - well, either really popular or really _not;_ it was honestly kind of hard to tell at the moment.

“You all right, Martin?” Tim asked. The group of four sat down at a table by the window. It was a prime spot, so it was probably _reserved_ , too. They all looked too cool for it to be legal. They all looked too cool to be _real_.

“Who are they?” Martin asked, voice a little hoarse. He took a desperate drink of water and tried to resist the temptation to look back at the table again. He’d have to twist his head, and it would be super obvious, so it was better to avoid that at least for now. It would be bad to get branded as … as some kind of rubbernecker or something on the first day.

“Oh, the Bouchards,” Tim said, because of course it was obvious who Martin was talking about. He rolled his eyes a little.

“The Bouchards?”

“They’re all adopted, and they all hate each other,” Sasha said conspiratorially. “But they hate other people even more? So they’re stuck together. It’s kind of like a rat king situation.”

“Gross,” Tim said. “Anyway, they’re a big deal here because they’re rich, but also - _terrifyingly_ hot.”

“Tim tried to get a date with Annabelle once,” Sasha said. “The girl with the hair? Yeah. One word from her and he spent the rest of the day carrying her shit around.”

“Never again,” Tim said with a shudder.

“Who are the other ones?” Martin asked, trying not to sound too invested.

“Okay, so the other girl is Jane?” Sasha said. “She’s got this lovey-dovey hippie attitude and she’s _really_ into entomology, but somehow she still makes it _work_ for her.”

“And the blond guy is Michael,” Tim said, grinning at Sasha.

“He’s _nice,_ ” Sasha said, a bit too insistently. “And a proper gentleman, unlike _someone_ at this table I could mention.”

“Sasha’s had a crush on him since they moved here,” said Tim.

“Okay, no,” Sasha said. “It’s not a _crush_ , he’s just a sweet guy. He’s friendly!”

“Hey, I’m friendly, too,” Tim said.

Sasha rolled her eyes at him, but she was grinning.

Martin felt like he was watching something private. He cleared his throat. “Who’s the other guy?”

“Jonathan Bouchard,” said Tim. “He’s kind of a prick, in that scornful librarian kind of way. I was partnered with him in History last year and it was a real _experience_ , let me tell you.”

“Yeah?” Martin asked, trying desperately not to sound too interested.

“Don’t make me relive it, Martin, it was tedious enough the first time,” Tim said. “He’s fun to tease, though. Doesn’t know what to do with human interaction.”

“Huh.”

At the Bouchard table, Jonathan was staring dispassionately out of the window. His profile was sharp and serious and horribly, achingly lovely.

Martin stuffed crisps into his mouth to keep from saying anything embarrassing.

-

Sasha showed him the way to English Lit, and then slid into a seat in the back corner of the room, leaving him to flounder awkwardly for a few seconds before sitting down in an empty seat at the front of the window row.

Right.

So far, so good, he supposed. He took a deep breath, and then pulled out his notebook. Time to be … a person who kept taking A-level English Lit, he supposed. A person who was taking classes and prepping for uni and who would probably at some point … get into uni, maybe?

It wasn’t that his old school had been bad.

It was probably just fine, as far as schools went.

He just hadn’t been … present. Mentally, for the most part, but then physically, too. At the end of last year, it had become increasingly difficult to stay at all, because he wasn’t making great grades in the first place and while he loved some of his classes, nothing felt … _useful_ right then. Nothing _helped_ , and at home mum was getting sicker and sicker and the bills were piling up and up and up, little molehill mountains that made him nauseated even before he could open them.

So.

Finishing his A-levels hadn’t really been part of the plan, exactly.

It was hard to … to turn around and make it part of the plan again.

Like, education was good, obviously. And he wanted to go to uni, had thought about it with a liquid poison jealousy, the harm of _not having_ stinging sourly, like milk that had gone off. He’d dreamed about it, the romantic idea of studying Literature or Creative Writing or History - 

But.

But it was impossible to separate it from. From everything else.

So it wasn’t. It didn’t feel worth it. How _could_ it feel worth it? How could he set it up like a neat sum, line up the numbers all accurate and careful, and then come up with an answer that didn’t come with a minus in front of it, when being here - when A-levels and not having to work a side job unless he _wanted_ to and having the opportunity to finish high school and go to uni, when all of these things were tied up so tightly with - with all the _other_ things, the things Martin wanted desperately to not think about.

Like the bills.

Or that particular antiseptic smell, and how it lingered in your nose for hours after, even though there was no _real_ reason that it should, even though it was probably all in your head.

Like the numb calm feeling of sitting by her hospital bed.

Like -

Someone sat down next to him. He startled, dropping his notebook onto the desk. His pen clattered onto the floor.

“Sorry!” He bent down to fish it up, and almost brained himself on a bony knee in his efforts. “Sorry, sorry, you really startled me!”

He picked up the pen, and emerged from beneath the desk.

Jonathan Bouchard was sitting next to him.

He was _looking_ at him. His eyes were mesmerising, still beautiful enough to make Martin breathless.

And the look on his face spoke - volumes. It spoke volumes, and the volumes were all bad.

Martin swallowed nervously. “Um.”

“Class is starting,” said Jonathan. His voice was - 

_Oh no_ , Martin thought.

A short, old woman - Miss Robinson, Martin thought - entered the classroom. She looked too old to be teaching.

She let them all know that they would be working in pairs for a presentation about different plays and sonnets by Shakespeare. She told them to get in pairs based on their seats and discuss, and then to write their names and the play or sonnets they would go with on the blackboard.

“So - so what should we go with?” Martin asked, trying not to seem too eager and desperately hoping Jonathan would say sonnets, even if the idea of Jonathan Bouchard reading sonnets was enough to make his heart feel like it was already exploding.

“Hamlet,” Jonathan said, already standing up.

Martin stared at him. “ _Hamlet?_ ”

“Yes?” said Jonathan. “Is that a problem?”

“It’s just a bit, um, dreary,” said Martin. “I was thinking maybe we could go with the sonnets?”

Jonathan made a face like he’d bit down on a lemon. “Absolutely not.”

“Wh-why not?”

“Because,” said Jonathan, with the long-suffering care of a person explaining something very simple to a child, “the sonnets are terrible.”

“ _What?_ ” Martin asked, loud enough that a few people turned around to stare at them. He cleared his throat. His face flushed so hot it hurt. Quieter, he said, “They’re _Shakespeare’s sonnets_.”

It sounded petulant even to him.

“Right,” Jonathan said derisively. “ _Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?_ ”

“ _Yes_ ,” Martin said, and then sputtered awkwardly. “I-I mean, his sonnets are better than _Hamlet_ -”

“Perhaps if you actually bothered to study it, you’d realise that _Hamlet_ is both a tragic masterpiece _and also_ very psychologically advanced for its time.”

“It’s just a guy making one stupid decision after another because a bloody ghost told him to,” Martin said. Jonathan glared at him.

“Wonderful,” he said, half under his breath. “As if this wasn’t enough of a mess already.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin said, “ _what?_ ”

“Gentlemen,” Miss Robinson said from behind her desk, cutting off whatever Jonathan was going to say next. “If you could finish your discussion and put your names on the board?”

“Yes, Miss,” Martin said, shamefaced. Then he looked up at the blackboard.

It was full of names. _Hamlet_ was taken.

So was _Sonnets (a selection)_.

So was everything but one.

With what felt like the eyes of the entire class on him, Martin stumbled to the blackboard, and wrote their names under _Romeo and Juliet._

_-_

Jonathan didn’t so much as acknowledge him for the entire rest of the lesson. When it was over, he got up so quickly that his chair screamed against the floor, and stormed out of the room.

Martin stared after him.

“What’d you do to offend him so badly?” Sasha asked, coming up to lean against the back of his chair.

“I - _nothing!_ ” Martin said. “He was just -”

“Like that?”

“Yeah.” Martin frowned. He rubbed at his eyes, not even bothering to remove his glasses first. “Oh _God_ , he’s my project partner and he’s a _prick_ and he _hates me \_.”

Sasha patted him on the shoulder. “There, there. It’ll only be a _little bit_ like pulling nails.”

“Not helping.”

“Okay, if you need any Jonathan wrangling tips, we’ll go and find Tim later. Let’s go to McDonalds or something after school, I’m hungry.”

“I - yeah, okay,” Martin said. He smiled tentatively at her. “That’d be great, actually.”


	3. Chapter Three

The McDonalds was squashed between a Tescos and a watch repair shop about halfway down Main Street, and the inside of it looked like any other McDonalds he had ever been to. His shoes squeaked against the laminated floor when he walked across it, and that felt familiar, too, in a slightly-to-the-left kind of way.

“Jon’s not _actually_ half bad,” Tim was saying, dipping fries into his chocolate milkshake. “He just takes everything very seriously.”

Somehow, that made things worse.

Martin buried his face in the crook of his elbow, groaning.

“Don’t worry, Martin,” Sasha said. “If he’s too much of a shit, I can tell Michael to tell him to back off.”

Martin shook his head into his sweater. “I should have known the cow thing was a sign.”

There was a brief silence where he could _feel_ Tim and Sasha exchange glances above him. He didn’t need to lift his head for it; some glances have their own kind of weight. Some silences speak, if not volumes, then at least an anthology.

He’d said too much, he realised.

His face heated. He stayed perfectly still.

“The cow thing?” Tim asked. There was a grin in his voice. He sounded _delighted._

“It’s not important,” Martin muttered into the table. It was a bit too sticky for comfort, which, _gross._

“Martin,” Sasha said, and he could hear the grin in her voice, too. “I’m pretty sure you saying it’s not important means it’s important.”

Martin sat back up and took a morose sip of his coke. “Fine,” he said. “When I went on that walk this morning? I stumbled on this … it was a cow? But it was dead, like in a really _horrible_ way, it was like it’d been ripped apart?”

“What the fuck,” said Tim.

“Uh, seconded,” said Sasha. “Did you find out what happened?”

There was a smear of dried ketchup at the edge of the table. It was probably hardened enough that he could peel it off in one piece if he wanted to. Martin swallowed. “No. I was about to leave when, well, Jonathan showed up?”

Tim and Sasha exchanged another look, but this one was easier to read; it said, underlined and bolded and in all-caps,  **YIKES** .

“Yeah, I know,” Martin muttered. “Anyway, I panicked and said I didn’t do it, and then he kind of just … glared at me and left?”

“Wow,” Sasha said, like she couldn’t quite decide whether it was appropriate to laugh or not.

“Bit of a _cow_ tastrophy, it sounds like,” Tim said, and he _did_ laugh, just a little. “Sorry, sorry, that sounds like the _worst_ introduction to the area.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t the best,” Martin admitted.

Silence fell across the table. Martin stared out of the window. It felt like it should be raining outside, just for the dramatic effect, but instead the sky was almost cloudless.

Martin sipped his coke and tried not to be too moody about it.

“He probably doesn’t hate you,” said Sasha, startling him out of his thoughts.

“What?”

“Jon,” Sasha said. “Probably doesn’t hate you. And if he does, he doesn’t really seem like the type to give you trouble over it.”

“He’ll definitely snark about how you format your references, though,” Tim said. “So if you really want to impress him, you could read up on that.”

“I don’t want to _impress_ him,” Martin said, face heating up again. “I just want to know if he’s being a prick because it’s personal or if that’s just how he is?”

“Okay, wait, no,” Sasha said, “do you - Martin. Do you _like_ him?”

“Oh my God,” said Martin.

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Tim.

Martin was _on fire_ and he wanted to crawl out of his own skin to escape the embarrassment of being in this situation.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he told them. “Don’t -”

Tim and Sasha gave him twin serious faces.

"Secret's safe with us," said Tim.

"It's not even that I _like_ him," Martin said mournfully. "He's a _prick!_ It's just. He's _so hot._ It's _unfair._ "

He scrubbed at his face again, sighing.

“Know how you feel, mate,” Tim said, reaching out his strawberry milkshake in a somber toast.

Sasha made a sympathetic noise into her burger. “If he keeps being a prick, we’ll sort him for you,” she said. It made her sound a little like a small-time mobster.

Martin gave her a weak grin. “Thanks.”

“Just try to be as prepared as you can,” said Tim. “He usually appreciates that, even if you don’t get it all the way right.”

“All right,” Martin said. “Yeah. I mean, I would have done that anyway, but I’ll just … make sure to be _extra_ prepared.”

-

He ended up holed up in his room that night, writing poem after stupid, flowery poem, trying to find the words to describe the colour of Jonathan’s eyes, the angles of his terrible, no-good face, only half realising that was even what he was trying to _do_ until he was looking down at the finished drafts.

They weren’t bad, in the end.

Just embarrassing.

-

Jon wasn’t in class on Wednesday. His chair stayed stubbornly empty through the entire lecture. Martin kept turning around to look at it, like maybe the next time he turned around, Jon would be there, scowling at him.

But he wasn’t.

Of course he wasn’t.

It felt stupidly personal, like Jon was skipping school just to mess with him. Like he was doing this just to put Martin off his game.

Which was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and Martin kept telling himself that he was being stupid and glancing at the empty chair and then telling himself that he was being stupid again, rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat.

-

He didn’t see any hint of Jon for the rest of the week. The rest of the Bouchard siblings were all there, grinning coldly at their lunch table, so he probably hadn’t _died_ or anything, but -

“He’s probably just sick,” Sasha told him. Tim pushed a carrot stick in his general direction.

Martin took the carrot. “Yeah,” he said, “probably.”

But he still couldn’t quite make himself believe it.

Other than the Jon Thing (which he was trying desperately not to think about as “the Jon Thing” and failing), everything was going … fine.

He wasn’t sleeping too well, and he kept getting things wrong in class, but everyone was being pretty understanding about it. Being pretty kind. Even his teachers. Even Helen, who was looking more stressed every time he saw her, who would sit him down and talk him through whatever maths problem he was stumbling over.

His dad was

His dad was trying.

Martin was trying, too.

Maybe that meant mostly staying in his room and watching romcoms and writing poetry until two in the morning and then sleeping for three hours. Maybe it meant talking a lot but never about anything of substance. Maybe it meant listening to Sasha and Tim banter like they’d known each other their entire lives and feeling somehow both part of something and incredibly lonely at the same time.

He was really, really trying.


	4. Chapter Four

He slept for most of the weekend, and it felt strange, not being needed or needed elsewhere. Thinking about it too hard made him nervous, so he tried not to. On Sunday, his dad insisted on taking him on a walk to show him the town, and it was … fine. He’d seen most of the town already, at Tim and Sasha’s insistence, and the conversation was blandly polite and about as weighty as spun sugar, ready to melt away into nothing at a moment’s notice.

At night, he curled up on himself and watched people fall in love and fall in love and fall in love on his computer screen. He wrote poetry and crossed it out and crumpled it up and threw it in the bin. He went to bed too late and had strange, vivid dreams that he couldn’t quite remember, except for the smell of antiseptic and a pair of rust-coloured eyes in the half-dark, staring and staring and -

Napping was better.

Less likely to have him waking up in a cold sweat.

-

The bus was late on Monday morning. He had to sprint the last bit of the way to math class, and arrived sweaty and breathless and five minutes late. Mr Clark frowned at him from the front of the room.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Martin murmured, trying not to bump into anything on his way through the classroom. He slid into his seat next to Helen, pulled out his books and ducked his head down. The lesson moved at a glacial pace. He kept drifting off, kept thinking he smelled antiseptic, and -

Helen was shaking, he realised with a start. She’d been a bit fidgety last week, but now she was worse, eyes wide and face pale and fingers twisting and jerking like spiders dying.

“You okay?” Martin asked, quiet enough that the teacher wouldn’t hear. Helen startled and turned to stare at him.

“I’m, I’m fine,” she said hoarsely. Her eyes kept flitting away from his, like she couldn’t focus; like she was trying to keep an eye out for something. She picked up her pencil and set it down and picked it up again, like she couldn’t keep her hands still for long enough to figure out what to do with it. Martin leaned in closer.

“Are you sure?” he asked, as gently as he could. “If you need to go to the nurse -”

“No,” she said, a little sharply, and then closed her eyes and breathed very slowly and deliberately for a moment. “I don’t want to go to the nurse.”

“Okay,” Martin said. “That’s okay? I mean, I wasn’t going to _force_ you or anything, it was only -”

Helen looked back at him again, but now there was a desperate intensity in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

“It’s, it’s nothing the nurse can fix,” she said, and the words came out halting, barely voiced. She leaned so close her hair brushed his shoulder. She was pushing the pencil against the paper hard enough to break through the page. “I think someone is _following_ me.”

Martin opened his mouth to say - something, _anything_ , but nothing came out.

Then the bell rang, and Helen got up and disappeared out of the room faster than Martin could follow, not even stopping to pick up her stuff. Martin gathered it up and went to follow her, but when he got out into the hallway, she was nowhere to be found.

-

He found himself staring at the Bouchard table during lunch. Michael kept laughing at whatever Annabelle was saying, and his laugh was high and wobbly and weirdly grating.

The dark-haired girl - Jane - caught him looking, and winked.

-

When he got to English Lit, Jon was sitting by the window.

Martin froze, brain stuttering.

Jon didn’t seem to notice; he was staring out of the window, profile sharp and eyes - pensieve, Martin thought. That was the word. He looked like a statue, like someone had carved him out of rock, slowly and lovingly and taking great care to get every part exactly right.

Martin swallowed, unsteady on his feet.

 _Keep it together_ , he told himself.

Who did Jon think he was, anyway?

“That’s my seat,” he told him, unable to keep the tetchiness out of his voice. “You’d know if you’d been here this week.”

Jon turned around, fixing him with an owlish stare. “Martin,” he said.

His eyes were all wrong.

Last week, they had been dark, reddish brown. Martin was sure of that. He was _sure_ , he was -

But they weren’t brown anymore.

Instead, they were golden, like sunlight through honey.

It didn’t look like any kind of eye colour Martin had ever seen on a real person before. It looked like it belonged in - in an anime, or a Disney movie, or something. Too bright to be real.

Martin sat down heavily in the chair next to Jon, frowning.

“What?” Jon asked, voice clipped.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” Martin asked, and then felt himself flush. That was really tactless. Even to Jon, that was -

Jon blinked, once, twice, and then turned his face away. “My eyes are fine.”

“Okay,” said Martin, and then, like poking a bruise, “only they’ve changed colours, so I was wondering if they were contacts, or -?”

“ _Martin_ ,” Jon said, sharper this time. “It’s none of your business.”

Martin winced. “Sorry.”

Jon blew out an irritated breath. It caused his fringe to flutter, just a little. “Look, I have a - a condition.”

“Oh,” Martin said. He felt like a heel. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, I -”

“It’s fine,” said Jon. He made a face, and then class was starting.

Martin paid attention to pretty much none of it.

Later, he was about to get up and leave when Jon cleared his throat behind him. Martin turned around to look at him.

“Look,” Jon said, frowning at the edge of his desk. “I … believe we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

He looked strangely vulnerable like this. Something about the slope of his shoulders, the way he held himself, curling slightly inward like he was preparing for a fight.

Just … prickly and sad.

Like maybe he could use a hug, or a cup of tea, or, or a blanket or something.

“I … suppose?” Martin said instead.

Jon glanced up at him and back again, a quick flash of gold. His mouth went tight at the edges. “We don’t have to like each other,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “But I’m sure we can both agree to be … professional, I suppose, for the duration of this project?”

Martin stared at him. His insides went cold, and his face went hot, and he felt -

Stupid. Again.

So, so stupid for thinking this would be anything other than what it was, for entertaining any kind of, of sympathetic thought for Jonathan _fucking_ Bouchard, for -

But that was fine. It was _fine_. He was used to being stupid.

“Sure,” he said, and if it came out too sharply, Jon didn’t seem to notice.

“Good,” he said. He’d gone back to looking at the table, and his fingers were tapping impatiently against his knee. He was wearing slacks, Martin realised. Who the hell wore slacks when they didn’t have to? Who -

“Great,” said Jon, with emphasis and a chalky little smile.

“Sure,” Martin said again. Then he turned around and left as quickly as he could.

-

He was in a shit mood for the rest of the week, weekday and weekend passing one after the other in an angry funk that even _he_ could admit was starting to be maybe a bit over the top.

On Monday, he sat down in Maths and he got out his books and class was _fine_ but now Helen was the one who wasn't there, and part of him thought maybe he was being hypocritical for not taking that as personally.

Like he thought he had some kind of _claim_ on Jon's time or something.

Mostly, though, he just felt … unsettled.

Helen had been so jumpy last week.

He should have talked to her about it.

He should have -

-

"Helen Richardson?" Sasha repeated, like she was chewing on it.

"Yeah," Martin said, "I don't have her number, but she wasn't in class today, so -"

"Checking up on her well-being?" Tim asked, leaning over the table to steal one of Sasha's grapes. "Martin, you _dog!_ "

"It's not," Martin began, and then gave it up as a lost cause. He sighed. "I just wanted to see if she'd like me to … drop off my notes to her. Or something."

"Or _something,_ " Tim said, waggling his eyebrows. Sasha slapped the grape out of his hand before he could eat it and stuffed it in her mouth.

"I'll get you her number," she said, still chewing. "Don't worry."

-

**Martin:** Hi Helen this is martin from class! I got your number from sasha (hope that's ok!) Just checking in to see if you wanted me to get you the notes from class today :) Hope you are feeling well! :)   
  


-

Helen still hadn't replied to his text by Friday.

Martin was thinking about it through PhysEd, and it made him clumsier than usual, fumbling passes like someone had paid him to throw the game. It was just … _odd_ , wasn’t it. It was just a bit _strange_.

And of course it was probably nothing.

But he couldn’t let it go.

After class, he found Jane Bouchard leaning on the wall next to the boys' locker room. She didn’t look like she belonged in PhysEd. Something about the way her shorts bunched around her waist, the way her t-shirt draped across her chest, made it look as though she was playing dress-up somehow.

"Martin," she said, and smiled, bright and beautiful and friendly, and it gave him the shivers.

He didn’t know how she knew his name, but he kind of hated that she knew it, that she knew enough about him - that she noticed him enough to want to talk to him.

And that wasn’t fair, probably.

It wasn’t as though she’d done anything to deserve him thinking that about her. Not to him, anyway. She was probably perfectly nice.

"Hi," Martin said. Jane's smile widened a tiny fraction at the waver in his voice.

"Could you do me a favour?" Jane asked.

There were people watching.

He should tell her he didn’t have time, that he was meeting Tim and Sasha to study, that he’d told his dad he’d come home early and help with some home improvement project, that he -

"Sure."

_Fuck._

"Great," said Jane, beaming. She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him the equipment storage locker and over to the stairwell. "I'll show you where it is, and then I'll tell you what I need."

"Um," Martin said. He was pretty sure he might get murdered.

She led him down and down and down until they reached the basement, and then past rows of dusty lockers and barely-used classrooms and toilets, turning down at the end of the hallway into what looked like a janitor's closet.

"Um," Martin said again. He was _definitely_ going to get murdered.

"It's just here," said Jane, making her way to the corner of the room, bending down by the edge of a shelving unit. She sounded _delighted._ "Just _look!_ "

Martin looked.

He didn't want to, and he knew he would regret it before he did, but he did look.

It was … a wasp's nest, or something like it, clinging to one of the porous, pebblebrick walls.

And it was -

It was -

Moving, undulating, pulsing like a beating heart, a lump of flesh grafted to a larger organism, it was -

 _Singing,_ Martin realised. It was singing.

And there were -

Not wasps. It was not a wasp's nest at all, because the more he stood there, watching, the more he could see _worms,_ small and silver like half-moons, like nail clippings. With surprising speed, they began to pour from the nest and onto the floor.

"Jane," Martin said, half question and half warning, though he couldn't say what he was warning her about. "What is this?"

She didn't answer. She was just standing there, watching, and - and humming.

Humming that same worm's nest song.

Martin turned to run, tripping over a box of cleaning supplies.

He landed hard on his knees, hard on the concrete.

Jane was coming closer, still singing, and the tune echoed horribly in his skull.

Martin pushed himself off the concrete, wincing, and threw himself at the door, putting his entire weight on the handle.

He slammed into it with enough force to make him breathless.

But it wouldn't budge.

Why wouldn't it budge? He turned to stare at Jane, who was still walking toward him, slowly, like she knew she didn't have to worry about catching him.

Which would probably have been fair, even _without_ the door in his way. He wasn't a great runner.

Still.

"Did you _lock_ the door?" he asked. It came out somewhere between affronted and terrified, which was fair, because he was absolutely feeling both of those.

"Don't worry, Martin," Jane said, still half-singing. "You'll make a great home."

There was a collection of mops in a bucket by the shelves to his right. Martin awkwardly shimmied toward it, keeping his back to the wall.

"What the fuck," he hissed under his breath, "what the fuck what the _fuck -"_

The song was getting louder. Worms were spilling out to cover a larger and larger area of the concrete. It shouldn't be possible, Martin thought, how were that many of them even able to fit -

He reached the bucket of mops and pulled out one at random. The rest fell over, clattering loudly onto the floor.

Jane laughed. "Oh, honey bee," she said, and her mouth had so many _teeth_ in it. "You _are_ cute."

“Right, well, I’m _not interested_ -”

The door slammed open with a bang.

Martin spun around with a yelp.

Jon was standing in the doorway. The sparse, cool light of the room cast strange shadows across his face. His eyes flashed pale gold and brighter still, briefly resting on Martin before landing on Jane.

The room was suddenly very quiet.

"Jane," Jon said, with a softness in his voice that felt dangerous.

"Oh, don't look like that," said Jane. She rolled her eyes. "I was only playing."

"Were you," Jon said flatly. It felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

"Is that a _question,_ Jon?" Jane asked, sing-song. Jon scowled at her.

"No," he said stiffly. "But you should leave Martin alone."

"Fine," said Jane. She shifted her shoulders, adjusted her t-shirt. The worms were gone. It was as though they had never even been there in the first place. "I have had my fun."

Then she brushed past him and disappeared out the door.

Martin stared after her, and then at Jon.

Jon stared back at him. His eyes were wide in the half-dark. He looked - he looked almost _scared._

There was a part of Martin that wanted to - what, to _comfort_ him?

Christ.

Instead, all he managed to sputter out was, " _What?"_

"Ah," Jon said. He stopped, and gave Martin a searching look. Martin had no idea what he was looking for, and even less of an idea of whether or not he found whatever it was he was trying to find, but eventually he looked away and sighed. "I'm sorry."

" _Sorry?_ " Martin repeated. "Are you - what _is_ this?"

Jon gave him another, more constipated look. Then he turned on his heel and left.

Martin stared after him. " _Seriously?_ "


	5. Chapter Five

So _something_ was clearly up.

He curled up at the desk in his bedroom after dinner and wrote down everything he could think of. The dead cow, Jane and the worms, Helen's growing jumpiness, Jon throwing open a locked door, his eyes changing colour …

Martin huffed out an annoyed breath, tapped the pen in a staccato rhythm against the tabletop.

It was all weird. Some of it was even _spooky_.

But none of it fit together.

Even _if_ there was some, some perfectly normal, non-spooky explanation.

There just wasn't enough information.

He didn't even know where to _begin_ getting more of a handle on it.

"Better keep an eye out, then, I suppose," he told himself, and then felt very silly.

He really wanted to think he was just being silly. That maybe he'd just, just _imagined_ the whole thing with the worms somehow.

But he couldn't quite make himself believe it.

Anyway. Keeping an eye out. Keeping on his toes probably wouldn't _hurt._

-

When he got to class on Monday, Helen was back.

She was sitting in her usual seat, looking down at her textbook with a faint smile on her face. Her red hair fell in shiny corkscrew curls around her shoulders. She looked paler, too. Sort of … milky.

And she was sitting completely still.

Too still. It was like someone had made a wax figure of her and left it in her seat.

It made him feel … apprehensive.

Someone brushed into Martin from behind, jostling him into moving. He stumbled over to his seat and sat down.

Helen looked up at him and grinned.

"Hello, Martin," she said, and her smile was so, so bright.

“Hello,” Martin said. He tried to shove the weird, cloying uncertainty aside. “Feeling better this week?”

Helen gave him a long, unblinking stare. The smile slipped just a little.

 _Oh no,_ Martin thought. That was probably too much. He’d made things awkward somehow. Probably Helen was trying to not make things awkward, or to cling to normalcy, or maybe whatever it was had just - had just _passed_ , normally, because it hadn’t really been anything important in the first place, he’d just misjudged it.

Then Helen laughed, high and melodic and strangely familiar, somehow, even though he’d never heard her laugh like that before.

“Oh, Martin,” she said, “don’t worry about _me_.”

“Just wondering,” said Martin. He fidgeted with the lid of his pencil case. “I sent you a text in case you needed the notes from class, but I guess you didn’t see it?”

“Oh, no,” said Helen. She leaned back in her chair. “I was otherwise occupied.”

“Right, yeah,” Martin said, and suddenly he was sure he’d misjudged _nothing_. Nothing about this felt right. Shoving it away to think about later, he gave a small laugh. “I mean, it’s not like it’s _important_ or anything, I was just wondering.”

“Well, then. Thank you for wondering.”

And her eyes were -

Her eyes were all wrong.

They’d been blue, last week. And he wasn’t. He hadn’t been _obsessing_ about anyone’s eye colour but Jon’s, maybe, but this was -

Her eyes were dark red. Like rust, or dried blood.

The same colour Jon’s eyes had been on the day Martin first met him.

Martin smiled back at her. He rambled at her about a movie he’d seen over the weekend, because if he was talking, at least he didn’t have time to be _quite_ as terrified as he wanted to be.

-

Jon was steadily ignoring him in English Lit.

Again.

It would be infuriating even _without_ the whole Helen thing, without the Jane thing, without the disappearing-for-a-week thing. Martin tried not to be too obviously huffy about it, but he was pretty sure he was failing. Robinson kept pausing her lecture to give him Looks.

Which should probably have been embarrassing.

Which _was_ embarrassing, but he was too angry to really feel it at the moment.

Maybe he’d lose sleep over it later or something, cringing about catching her attention like that. That was fine. It was _fine_ , because Jon was sitting next to him, and he’d taken the window seat again, and he was scowling out of the window while Martin scowled at _him._ It was grey and drizzly outside, too, which really completed the image. Jon looked like a, a Jane Austen love interest, and that was infuriating, too.

As quietly as he could, Martin tore a strip of paper out of his notebook and wrote:

_We need to talk._

Then he folded it once, running his nail over the crease before sliding it over to Jon. Jon startled at the movement. He unfolded the paper and then he was frowning at _that_ instead of the window, and would it kill him to make another facial expression? Was he even - was that even a thing he could _do?_

He was being unfair, he knew he was, but then Jon crumpled up the note and pushed it off the table, and suddenly he felt perfectly, terrifically justified.

Scowling, Martin wrote another note, pressing the pencil hard enough into the paper that it left deep lines in the page beneath.

_It’s about the lit project_

Which was, okay, maybe not _entirely_ true, but they _did_ need to talk about the project.

They could just also … talk about some other things.

If he got Jon alone, he might be able to get some _answers_.

He seemed like he’d have a harder time brushing off school-related stuff than … him and his adopted family possibly being monsters, anyway.

Martin slid the note over with more force this time, poked Jon’s elbow insistently with the corner edge of the paper. Jon’s mouth did a sour little twist.

Martin glared at him until he opened the note and read it, and then he looked away, pretending to pay attention to the lecture.

Jon pulled out a pen and began to write a reply. Martin couldn’t quite stop himself from glancing back at him what felt like every two seconds.

The reply, when it came, was in a nearly unreadable, spiky chicken scratch:

_Library after school._

Right.

So that was that decided.

-

The school library was small, and the cramped shelves were bursting with books. The room smelled faintly of dust and old paper. When Martin arrived, Jon was standing stiffly by the help desk. The library lights picked up the natural highlights of his hair, making him look like the world’s most uncomfortable hair care model.

“Hi,” Martin said, shifting the straps of his backpack a little. “Sorry I’m late, I-”

Jon did a little sideways shuffle away from him, one step and then another, before awkwardly clearing his throat.

“Martin,” he said. Then he didn’t say anything else. He wasn’t looking at Martin, either, just staring at a table exhibit of books about the Russian revolution like it owed him money.

“Um,” said Martin, and, “anyway, so,” and finally, “I guess we should go sit down somewhere?”

“Right,” said Jon, like he hadn’t thought of that. “Right, yes, of course. There’s a table in the back that’s -”

“Sure,” Martin said, a bit too eager.

“Right,” Jon repeated. The gold of his eyes was faded, less bright than it had been last week.

He led Martin through the stacks to a line of small, circular tables by one of the windows. The wall was lined with a number of surprisingly realistic plastic ferns. Jon took a seat by the table that was closest to the largest amount of wall, squeezed into the corner. Martin followed suit.

“I suppose we should have sat down and talked about this sooner,” Jon said. “Ideally, we should have been halfway through the project by now. I apologise for my -”

“What did you do to Helen?” Martin asked, cutting him off.

Jon blinked. His mouth worked silently for a moment, like he was trying to process words or form a sentence and coming up with nothing. “I’m - sorry, what?”

“Helen,” Martin repeated. “Richardson? She’s in - um, she’s in my Maths class.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Jon said. It didn’t look like he was lying, either - he looked completely bewildered.

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Martin said. His face heated up. “What matters is, she’s got the,” he gestured at his eyes, “you know, that _thing_ you have?”

Jon swallowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Martin rolled his eyes at him. “What I _mean_ is, her eyes used to be a different colour? And now they’re the colour _your_ eyes used to be before they changed colour, that first time I met you.”

“... I see,” Jon said, after a very long pause. He was gripping the pen so tightly his knuckles were turning white. “I didn’t know about that.”

“Are you -” Martin began, and then cut himself off.

“Am I _what,_ Martin?” Jon asked, through gritted teeth.

Martin gave an exasperated sigh. “I don’t _know_! I don’t know, _Jon_ , but it looks like your family might be -”

“Good lord,” Jon muttered, like Martin was stupid for bringing it up. Like it was a dumb thing to get hung up about. Martin gave him a sharp look.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said primly, “for a human to change eye colour like that.”

“I told you,” Jon said. “It’s a condition.”

“ _Is_ it?” Martin asked. “Is being able to open locked doors a condition too? How about making people hallucinate worms, what condition is that?”

Jon made a face. “Look,” he said. “Don’t ask me about it. We can’t talk about this. I, I can’t - you shouldn’t get involved.”

Which.

What the _fuck_.

“You,” Martin said. The words wouldn’t fit right in his mouth. It all kept clogging up the back of his throat, like a glob of slime. Like a coagulated scream. He grimaced, shifted forward in his seat. “You keep telling me to back up and to not get involved, but _guess what_ ? I already _am_ involved! Jane took me to the worm basement! My _friend_ just disappeared and then came back - _weird_! You’re being really infuriatingly vague like you think it’ll keep me out of things, but really it will probably just get me _killed_ by one of your siblings, or, or whatever else is going on here-”

Jon scooted his chair back. It screeched loudly against the floor. His eyes were very wide; the white was visible all the way around his irises.

With a start, Martin realised that he’d been - he’d been looming over him. Not intentionally, but - but he’d definitely been looming. And Jon looked - there was an anxious, intent air about him, like - like he was _scared_.

Martin sat down fast enough for his chair to protest.

Looming was such a _dad_ thing to do; he’d done it last night, at dinner, and Martin had hated it then, had hated it before, too, at the time when his parents had still been together and every argument between them ended in the same way.

“Sorry,” Martin said. “I didn’t mean to, I. Sorry for, um, looming.”

Jon blinked at him, slowly, like he didn’t quite remember how to close his eyes. He swallowed - Martin tracked the slow bob of his Adam's apple - and pinched his lips together. There was a strange, naked vulnerability to him. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” said Martin. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything, I just wanted answers.”

“Right,” Jon said. He cleared his throat awkwardly. He seemed a bit more himself. A bit less vulnerable. “I’m. I suppose I’m sorry, too. That I can’t give you any answers. And … and I really don’t know anything about your friend.”

Martin pushed up his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Right,” he said. He sighed. “Thank you. I - I suppose we should probably work on the project a bit.”


	6. Chapter Six

They met at _Sally's_ on Saturday to work on the project again.

Every other table in the café had a tealight and a vase with a single plastic flower, and the interior gave off a slightly tired air. It was mostly deserted, except for a group of four old men playing cards at a table by the door. Martin ordered a tea and an egg sandwich. Jon ordered a cup of coffee.

“Having a nice day, then?” the woman behind the counter asked them. Her name tag read "Eileen". Jon didn’t seem to know what to do with the question at all; Martin smiled at her and told her they were working on a school project, and she gave them both an understanding look. “Well, best of luck to you. Let me know if you need anything.”

Then they sat down in one of the booths. It was red vinyl and black plastic, all faux American fifties diner, and it smelled faintly of lemons and smoke that even eight years of inside smoking-bans hadn’t been able to entirely get rid of.

Martin ate his sandwich.

Unbidden, Jon launched into an extremely thorough, ranting explanation of tannins. It was … it was really charming. It shouldn’t be, obviously, but it _was_ ; Jon’s eyes lit up as he talked, and his face went all open and unselfconscious, a little lost in the excitement of sharing something interesting.

And Martin might not normally be interested in tannins, but it was different, somehow, hearing about them from Jon. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from him.

Then they worked on the project until lunchtime, when Martin’s stomach started growling again.

“Oh!” he said, surprised and a little awkward. Jon looked up from the book he was reading and blinked blearily at him.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. It sounded almost … soft.

“Yeah,” Martin said, “I’ll just go get another sandwich or something -” he dug into his pockets, checked the amount of cash he had left. It was more than enough.

He glanced at Jon’s cup, wondering idly if he should offer to get him a refill, but it didn’t look like Jon had drunk any of the coffee.

It must be stone cold by now, Martin realised.

Jon gave him a questioning look.

Martin got up. “D’you want anything?”

“I, ah,” Jon said. His eyes flicked from Martin to the coffee to Eileen behind the counter. “No. Thank you.”

“... All right,” Martin said. He got another sandwich and a pot of tea.

When he came back to the table, Jon had gone back to reading, making a careful note in his notebook. His neck was bent, hair falling in front of his eyes. His collarbone was just barely visible over the v of his shirt.

Martin bit the inside of his cheek.

“Tea?” he asked. It felt rude not to, but he already had a feeling that -

“I’m fine, thank you,” Jon said absentmindedly. He tapped the pen against his lower lip, frowning thoughtfully.

That was -

It was _not fair_.

Martin poured himself a cup. He read and annotated a few passages while eating, careful not to get egg on the paper.

“So,” he said, still eyeing the page. “I reckon there might be something interesting here with -” he reached out for his tea, but miscalculated, knocking it off the table.

It crashed onto the floor and shattered.

“ _Shit,”_ he hissed. There was tea all over, pooling into the grooves between the black-and-white floor tiles.

Jon put down his book and leaned forward, but Martin was already moving, bending down to pick up the pieces. They were slick with liquid and too hot to touch properly -

“Martin,” Jon said, like a warning.

The ceramic slipped in his grip, cutting into the flesh of his palm.

“ _Ah_ ,” he hissed, dropping it.

Then Eileen was there, sweeping up the pieces in a dustpan and tutting under her breath.

“You alright there, love?” she asked, with a glance at his palm.

“I’m fine,” Martin said, a little strangled. The cut was just starting to sting, blood welling up and mixing with the tea that was still on his hands. He frowned at it. “Um, would you happen to have any bandaids?”

Eileen took his hand and gently pried his fingers away.

The cut was shallow, a short, straight line from the meaty edge of his palm into the centre. It hurt like a heartbeat, like a shard of ice, and he felt a little sick looking at it, but it wasn’t - it wasn’t _bad._ There wasn’t a lot of blood. It didn’t look like enough of an injury to need stitches.

“All right,” said Eileen. She let go. “I’ll see if I can find some bandaids. Go wash it in the bathroom, won’t you?”

“Yeah, okay,” said Martin, but she was already halfway across the room. He scooted his way out of the booth.

Jon was being weirdly quiet about the whole thing.

Martin turned back to look at him, and -

And something was wrong.

Jon sat ramrod straight in his seat, but _more_ than usual. He wasn’t moving, but it still looked like he was shaking. Like he was sitting so still it came all the way around and became proof of, of _effort_. Of a deliberate decision and strain.

His mouth was a line. His face was - he looked _grey._ And his eyes -

They seemed suddenly disconcertingly large, out of proportion with the rest of his features. Their pupils were so dilated that the gold of his irises was reduced to a thin sliver around the edge.

He was looking straight at Martin’s hand, at the blood slowly welling up in his palm.

_I should be scared_ , Martin thought.

He waited for the feeling to materialise, but mostly he was just feeling pain from the cut.

“Jon,” Martin said.

Jon didn’t react. He just kept staring, kept sitting completely still.

“ _Jon_ ,” Martin repeated.

Jon startled. His eyes skittered wildly around the room for a moment before landing on Martin’s face.

“Are you okay?” Martin asked.

“I shouldn’t be here right now,” Jon said. His voice was tight. His eyes kept flicking down to Martin’s hand and then back up to his face, over and over again.

“Is this,” Martin said. He swallowed. His throat was dry. Jon’s eyes were still so very wide.

But there was something vulnerable about him, too.

That didn’t make any sense.

It _didn’t_ , and an animal with its leg caught in a trap would still bite even if it was vulnerable.

Still.

_Still._

He was getting pretty good at handling people who bit back. He’d had a lot of experience.

And he didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know, but he thought he could see the shape of it, was starting to get enough information to fill out something that looked like almost a full picture.

Martin put his bleeding hand behind his back.

“Jon,” he said quietly, trying to word it right. “Are you having a family emergency?”

Jon blinked slowly at him, like he was having trouble catching the words Martin was saying.

Then he shook his head a little, as if to clear it.

“I,” he said, with what sounded like a great amount of effort. “Y-yes. Yes. I should -”

“Okay,” Martin said. That was that decided. “I’ll go to the bathroom and wash up, and while I’m in there, you can pack up your things and leave.”

Jon gave a short jerk of a nod.

“See you at school tomorrow,” Martin said.

Then he went to the bathroom and got cleaned up. Once he’d washed away the blood, the cut really didn’t look that bad.

He breathed a small sigh of relief.

Not that he was _surprised_ , exactly. It was just nice to know. He really didn’t want to have to tell his dad why he’d come back from studying with stitches.

He stayed in the bathroom for longer than he had to. It was a small room, just a toilet and a sink and a mirror on the wall with a hairline crack running up one corner. And the room was clean, and someone had lit a small, vanilla-scented candle and put it on the sink.

It was … pretty nice, Martin supposed, as far as café bathrooms went.

When he went back out again, Jon was gone, along with his stuff.

“Right,” Martin said under his breath. _Good_.

-

Helen was in a great mood on Monday morning. She kept cracking jokes. Martin laughed along, but it felt even more unsettling than last week. It took him the entire lesson to realise _why_ , but -

Her eyes were different.

That was it.

They were bright, ruby red.

-

“There’s been a murder,” Sasha said, sitting down next to Martin at lunch.

“Is it my dignity?” Tim asked, half grinning. “Because _wow_ did I bomb the quiz in Design and Technology.”

Sasha rolled her eyes at him. “No, Tim, I’m serious.” She leaned in toward the centre of the table. “Some girl was found dead this morning behind Tescos.”

“What?” Martin asked, feeling sick. This was it. This was the other shoe dropping.

“They’re not saying who it was,” Sasha said, with an intensity that was somewhere between fear and curiosity, “but they found the body last night. They’re saying she was twenty-something, so _my_ guess is she’s a university student.”

“Based on what?” Tim asked. “Your informant in _Overfield Weekly_?”

“Leave Sheila out of this, Tim,” Sasha said. “ _Anyway._ That’s not the weird part.”

“What’s the weird part?” Martin asked, and hated himself for asking.

“They say that whoever she was, her body had been _drained completely of blood_.”

Tim made a sound at the back of his throat. “Oh, that is _proper_ weird.”

The two of them quickly devolved into a heated discussion about who could have done it and how and why.

Martin sat very still.

Quietly and with feeling, he said, “ _fuck_.”

-

Jon gave him an awkward little smile as he slid into the chair next to him in English Lit. His eyes were almost as dark as they’d been the first time Martin met him.

Martin smiled weakly back. He wasn’t able to put a lot of energy into it; all his energy was spent vibrating through him like he’d stepped on a live wire.

Class was a blur. He couldn’t concentrate on any of it, kept circling back to that unnamed dead girl and her body drained of blood, to Jon staring at his hand at the café, to the ruby red of Helen’s eyes as she laughed her way through Maths class.

And oh.

_Oh._

He should have realised sooner.

He was an idiot. He should have _known_.

Unable to sit still unless he did _something_ , he ripped off a small square of paper from his notebook and wrote:

_Can we talk after school? It’s important._

Then he slid it over to Jon like a bad habit.

Jon frowned down at the note for a moment. He looked up at Martin. Their eyes met, and Martin still felt that spark in his gut, despite everything, like a firecracker going off. Jon swallowed, and then gave a short nod.

All right.

Right.

That was that settled, at least.

-

They met by the school gate this time.

“Where did you want to go?” Jon asked.

“Um,” said Martin. He didn’t know what places would be good. He barely knew anything about this place. “Let’s just go for a walk? Maybe in the woods? It’s, um, it’s family business.”

Jon made a face like he’d just sucked on a lemon. “Yours or mine?”

“Yours,” Martin said, wincing. “Sorry. It’s important.”

Jon sighed heavily. It made his fringe flutter. It was cute. “Fine.”

-

Once they’d gotten a ways up the gravel road, past the houses by the road and closer to the forest, Martin felt himself untense, just a little. Gradually, the gravel gave way to packed earth, and the trees around them were tall and almost bare. The ground was muddy and gave way beneath their shoes, sucking at Martin’s trainers as they walked. The air was cool and smelled like bonfires and damp wood and damp earth, like wet dog and running water.

Jon kept sneaking little, expectant glances at him when he thought Martin wasn't looking.

Right.

Time to talk.

“I think -” he said, just as Jon said, “Is it-”

They stopped and stared at each other for a moment, and then laughed. It was awkward and a little stilted, but it felt _good_ , laughing together for just a little bit.

And it was … it was lovely, seeing Jon laugh, seeing how his eyes crinkled and his mouth turned up at the corners. The way he looked like he was surprised to be laughing, taken off-guard by the sound he was making.

Just.

Despite everything.

It was nice.

“Sorry,” Martin said, once the laughter died down into a mellower quiet. “What did you want to say?”

Jon cleared his throat and looked away. “Is this about Saturday?”

He looked so _ashamed_.

“Kind of? It’s not,” Martin stopped, hands fluttering uselessly. “I mean, it’s a bit more general than that.”

“All right, so -?”

“I know what you are,” Martin said quickly, cutting him off. Jon’s mouth shut with a snap and his eyes went very wide.

“... Do you,” he said, and it sounded almost like a question.

“Yeah,” Martin said. “I know.”

Jon was standing very close, body turned in toward him. It occurred to Martin that this was probably a good way to get _incredibly_ murdered, if he’d misjudged him.

He didn’t think he’d misjudged him.

“Well,” Jon said. He shifted awkwardly. “Say it. Out loud.”

His eyes were so dark. Martin’s breath caught a little, meeting that gaze. He could fall into those eyes, probably, which was a bad look for this situation.

Martin took a deep breath. He breathed out slowly.

“Vampires,” he said. “That’s what you are, isn’t it? All of you?”

Saying it made it sound stupid, but there it was, laid out in the open space between them.

Jon looked away again, all sharp angles. He sighed, or laughed, or made a sound that was somewhere in between the two.

Martin watched him with a breath half-frozen in his chest, waiting for him to _say_ something, anything.

“How,” said Jon, staring at the ground between them, “how did you know?”

Hearing him confirm it was like a punch to the gut.

“ _Seriously_ ?” Martin said. “You’re _vampires?_ ”

“You’re the one who said it,” Jon said, and then had the gall to laugh at the look on Martin’s face, even if he did look a bit surprised at himself for laughing.

“I didn’t know I’d be _right_ , did I?”

“You _just said_ -”

“Yeah, okay, that’s where all the signs were pointing, but,” Martin said. “It sounds pretty dumb when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Oh my god. Vampires.”

Jon gave him a searching look, and then he laughed again, small and quiet. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“No, that’s,” Martin cleared his throat. “That’s very gothic romance of you, I think.”

“How lovely,” said Jon, deadpan, but he was still smiling just a little. “My favorite genre.”

Martin grinned at him.

Then he remembered the reason he’d pushed to meet here in the first place.

“They found a girl up behind Tescos,” he said. “She’d been drained of blood.”

“Wh-what,” said Jon, and then, hushed and urgent, “Martin. It wasn’t me, I promise -”

“I know,” Martin said. He kicked at the mud. “It was Helen.”

“She’s not with us,” Jon said.

“I didn’t say she was,” Martin said. “I just - how many vampires are there around? Because I don't know how this works, but if there's a, uh, if a vampire has to be _turned_ and there’s a limited amount of vampires hanging around -”

“It would have to be one of us,” Jon finished the sentence. He sighed. “ _Lovely_.”

“So - so after that girl turned up dead,” Martin said, “or, well, after she died but before they found her - _anyway_ , afterwards, Helen’s eyes were bright red, which -?”

“Is what happens when we drink human blood, yes.”

“And,” Martin said. He swallowed. “And what about … golden?”

Jon swallowed. “That’s. Animal blood.”

“Oh,” Martin said. “That … doesn’t make any sense?”

“It’s … metaphysical,” Jon said stiffly.

“Okay, is that true or are you just saying that?”

Jon scowled at him. “It’s true, as far as I can tell.”

“Hmm,” Martin said, opting to not call him on his bullshit. “So … you don’t have to eat people. And your eyes change colours if you do, so we could probably just see who else has red eyes, right?”

“You don’t think it’ll be that simple, do you?” Jon said, with a small, humourless smile. “You don’t have to drink someone’s blood to turn them.”

“Aw, _what_?”

“It’s a venom. Whoever turned her wouldn’t have had to drink any blood to do it. They would have to give her some of theirs instead.”

“All right, well,” Martin flapped his hands vaguely. “Do you have any idea why anyone _would_ turn her, then, if not to drink her blood?”

“For fun?” Jon said.

Martin frowned at him. “That’s -”

“Look, Martin, you don’t know my family,” Jon said. “They’re … some of them enjoy … scheming.”

“ _Scheming?_ ” Martin stared at him. “Turning a girl into an undead thing and watching as she kills people is _scheming_?”

Jon winced. “That’s,” he said. He made a face, picking at the edge of his jacket. “That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, okay, well,” Martin said. “Sorry.”

Silence fell between them like snow, soft and cold enough to make him shudder. Finally, Jon blew out another breath.

"I tried to tell you to stay away," he said miserably. "You could still leave, you know. If you wanted. I'll - I can handle this."

There was something about the way he stood, neck bent and eyes painfully sincere. Martin felt that look deep down in his bones.

It was noble, and it was stupid.

Impulsively, Martin pulled him into a hug. Jon gave a small "wuff" of surprise. He was cold, even through his clothes, and much less soft than Martin had expected. It felt like hugging a very bony marble statue.

Jon stiffened in his arms and then seemed to make a decision, mellowing, leaning into it.

They stood there for a while, just holding on to each other.

"Don't be silly," Martin told him, more quietly than he meant to. Jon inhaled shakily.

"Okay," he said, sounding like he was about to cry, or maybe like he was smiling. "I'll try not to be."


	7. Chapter Seven

The weather turned colder and colder still. Helen seemed to be grinning every time he saw her, eyes bright like warning lights and long fingers curling into her perfect, shining hair. Martin kept having to stop himself from staring, gut churning with unease.

“So what’s going on there?” Tim asked during lunch, nodding toward the table where Helen was sitting. She was surrounded by people Martin didn’t know and laughing at something one of them said.

“Hm?” Martin forcibly turned back to the table, where Tim was holding a soggy fish stick like a conductor’s baton.

“Helen Richardson’s looking fit, isn’t she,” Sasha said conversationally.

Martin stared at her. “What?”

“Are you going to ask her out?” Tim asked. “Take her to the Winter Formal?”

“Okay, first of all, there’s a Winter Formal?” Martin asked. “And second of all, _what?_ ”

“Oh, Martin, you sweet summer child,” Tim said. “Are you shy? Need a bit of a helping hand?”

Martin put his face in his hands. His glasses pushed up against his forehead.

“Aww, Martin,” Sasha said, half laughing. Martin glared at her through his fingers.

“I hate you both,” he muttered.

-

He met Jon at the library after school, and they crammed their way into the corner by the window. Jon's eyes were rust-coloured, still, and he was wearing a dark red sweater.

He looked really lovely.

Martin bit the inside of his cheek to keep from saying it out loud.

Jon must have caught the look on his face, because he raised an eyebrow at him. _What?_ his eyes were saying.

_You're really lovely,_ Martin thought.

"That cow in the road," he said instead. "When we first met. Was that you?"

Then he kicked himself. _Who says that?_

"No," Jon said. He made a face. "I don't play with my food."

"It was pretty weird, though, wasn't it?" Martin said, reaching into his bag and pulling out his notebook. _Oh no, shut up, talk about something else -_ "Almost looked like someone had put it there? I mean, its guts were all, you know, out there? It was just really - ”

“Shakespeare?” Jon said, a little strangled.

“What?” Martin asked. Jon twitched a little, eyes darting across the room like he thought someone might come through the stacks any minute.

“The project, Martin,” he said, spreading his fingers out across his notes.

“Oh,” Martin said. “Right. Um.”

“Shall we get started?” Jon said.

“Yep!” Martin said.

They worked until the library closed, comparing notes and arguing and making revisions. Jon kept getting distracted and trailing off, fingers twitching and drumming on the table. Martin wanted to ask him what was going on, to wrap him in a hug, to make him a cup of tea, but he didn’t do any of those things.

Their elbows kept brushing. Every time, it sent a spark through Martin’s gut.

Afterwards, they walked to the bus stop. Martin expected Jon to keep going, but he stopped and waited with him, watching the road with a sharp look on his face.

“Um,” said Martin. Jon didn’t seem to register his confusion, so he continued, “you take the bus?”

Jon looked at him and then back at the road. “Not usually.”

“You don’t have to follow me home or anything,” Martin said quietly.

“I’m, ah, our house is in the same direction,” Jon said. “Up the gravel road?”

“Oh,” said Martin, and immediately felt like an idiot. Of course it wasn’t about him. Of course. It was pretty ridiculous to think that it would be, really. He wasn’t sure where the idea had even come from.

“But I thought maybe we could … talk,” Jon said. His shoulders were all hunched up to the point where they almost hit his ears. The _talk_ had a weight to it.

“ _Oh_ ,” Martin said. “About the -? Right.”

“Right,” Jon echoed, a little higher than his usual voice, like he was holding in a laugh and it was spilling out into his voice.

Then the bus pulled in, and they took it to Martin’s stop, which was also _Jon's_ stop, and that felt like ... _something._

Then they were walking up the gravel road where they had met, back on Martin’s first night in town. It was colder now, getting on frosty, and Martin put his hands into his pockets to keep them warm. Jon wasn’t even wearing a jacket. His arms were crossed tight across his chest, but he didn’t seem to be feeling the chill or anything. Instead, there was a strange inward restlessness to him, like his insides were vibrating and he was trying very hard to keep it from showing.

“It could be any of them,” he said, breaking the silence. “Annabelle is always playing _some_ manner of mind games, Jane loves to, ah, have her _fun_ , Michael seems bored enough…”

“Any way to rule any of them out?” Martin asked.

“It’s,” Jon sighed. “I don’t know that it’s that simple.”

“Well, what are we doing, then?” Martin asked, more waspish than he meant to. It was just _frustrating_ , not being able to do anything, not knowing what to do.

“... trying to rule people out, I suppose,” Jon said.

“Right,” Martin said. “How do we do that?”

Jon hummed thoughtfully. “When Helen said she thought someone was following her … did she mention anything in particular?”

Martin thought about it. “I don’t … like what, where they were or what they looked like, or?”

“Like,” Jon curled in on himself a little more, “anything strange?”

Martin huffed. “Strange _how_ , Jon?”

“We’re … we have certain powers,” Jon said, awkwardly, like he was embarrassed. “Depending on who we used to be before we were turned.”

“What?” Martin said. “So … that worm thing Jane did?”

“Yes,” said Jon.

“What about the others?” Martin asked.

Jon kicked at the gravel. “Michael gets people lost. I suppose you could say he … confuses people. Makes them see things that aren’t there, makes them miss things that are. And Annabelle … Annabelle suggests things to people, and then they do it.”

“That’s messed up,” Martin said.

Jon smiled without humour. “Well, yes.”

“What about -?”

“You haven’t met Agnes and Melanie yet,” Jon said. “But Melanie is … shall we say _empowered_ by anger, and Agnes burns everything she touches.”

“Hang on, how many of you _are_ there?” Martin asked. “Why haven’t I -?”

“Met them?” Jon asked. Martin nodded. “Melanie is still in lower secondary school. And Agnes … left the family, I suppose? She’s studying History at Roehampton.”

“You can leave?” Martin asked. “I thought your family was more like some kind of … really small vampire mafia?”

Jon chuckled. “Hardly. I believe Elias felt she was becoming too much trouble, in any case.”

“Elias?”

“Elias Bouchard,” Jon said, with a bitter little smile. “Our benevolent father.”

“What’s his deal?”

“Well, he turned us,” Jon said. “He has been very clear about us keeping a low profile, though, so I doubt he’s behind … all this. It seems a bit too _messy_ for a man who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.”

“But he _turned_ you?”

“Yes, well,” Jon said, curling even further in on himself. “That was … more controlled than this. If people are finding bodies, that’s too much fallout.”

He said _finding_ bodies, like the sloppy cleanup was the real problem.

Martin shuddered. “So … his power is?”

“He can get in your mind.”

“Like read your thoughts?”

“Sort of? It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Jon said. “He can mostly see things you fear, I believe. He doesn’t use it much.”

Martin felt cold, colder than he should even with the weather. “But he still uses it?”

Jon shrugged. They walked for a while in silence, gravel crunching gently under their feet.

“Jon,” Martin said. “How old are you?”

Jon stopped. The look on his face was abject misery.

“Sorry,” Martin said.

“No, don’t apologise,” Jon said. “It’s only fair that you know.”

“So…?”

“I’m … seventeen,” Jon said.

Martin only rolled his eyes a little bit. “Yeah, okay, but how _long_ have you been seventeen?”

“... Ten years,” Jon said. “I was turned in 2005.”

“That’s - huh,” said Martin. “I thought you’d be like … ninety or something.”

“Ha.” Jon stared down at his shoes. “Do I seem like that much of an old man to you?”

“You do seem a bit … out of time, you know?”

“It’s, ah,” Jon said, still not looking at him, still with that small, wry smile, like he was trying to make a joke out of his own funeral. “Vampires don’t really _age_ , once they’ve been turned? We just … stay the people we were, slowly calcifying until this endless state of _unchange_ is all we can remember.”

“That’s -”

“Pretty pathetic, isn’t it, having all these powers and still complaining?”

“Sad. I was going to say it was sad.”

“Is it?” Jon’s tone of voice was carefully neutral.

“ _Yes_ ,” Martin said, feeling sick. At some point, he must have taken his hands out of his pockets, because now he was gesticulating wildly and not entirely on purpose. “You’re - you’re all _teenagers_? Except your, uh, “dad”. And, um, Agnes, I guess. You’re all teenagers and you don’t get to stop?”

“That’s the idea,” said Jon.

“That’s _messed up_ ,” Martin said, arms wide in emphasis, choking on how _wrong_ it was, thinking about Helen anxiously looking over her shoulder, about Jon, ten years ago and at the same age, meeting a monster and being changed forever by it. “Did he give you a _choice?_ ”

Jon shifted uncomfortably. “It wasn’t like that.”

“No?” Martin said. “So why did he pick all teenagers, Jon? Why did he -?”

“Don’t,” Jon said sharply. He looked paler than usual. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

Martin _very much_ wanted to still talk about it. He sighed heavily and put it away anyway. There would be other times, he told himself. Just because Jon didn’t want to talk about it _now_ , it didn’t mean that they couldn’t pick it back up later.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine.”

“Thank you,” Jon said quietly. It hurt, hearing him sound like that. Martin swallowed thickly.

“Hey,” he said, “can I - is it okay if I hug you?”

Jon made a face. “Do you even _want_ to?”

“Yeah,” Martin said. “Yeah, I do. If that’s okay with you.”

“I’m,” Jon said. He bit his lip. “Sure.”

“Okay,” said Martin, and hugged him. Jon leaned in close and sighed into his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in that same, horribly quiet tone of voice.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Martin said into his hair, holding him tighter. “It’s not your fault.”

-

When Martin got to class on Monday, Helen and Annabelle were having a whispered conversation. Annabelle was sitting on Helen's desk, leaning in close enough that her hair brushed the side of Helen’s face.

It looked almost like they were about to kiss, even with the room filling up around them.

There was still a few minutes left until class began, so Martin stepped back outside and stood with his back to the wall until Annabelle left the room. Halfway down the hallway, she was met by Michael. Martin couldn’t hear what they said, but he could hear the tone of it; Michael was sharp and angry. Annabelle was unconcerned. Amused.

-

His mum was there in his dreams.

He woke up with a start, heart pumping erratically in his chest like it was struggling, like it was fighting, like it was being squeezed by a fist. He put his head between his knees and sat there, panting, and sat there, breathing, and sat there, closing his eyes hard to keep the tears from welling up.

She’d been so -

He wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep.

He knew that much immediately.

The clock on his phone read 3:40.

With a heavy sigh, he got out of bed and stood very still in the middle of his bedroom, trying to decide what to do.

He ended up pulling out his phone, typing out a message he was too tired to overthink.

**Martin:** Hey I know this sounds weird but do you want to go for a walk?   
  


He sent it and then he got dressed. The reply ticked in while he was pulling on his sweater.

**Jon:** Sure.   
  


Which was … not the most encouraging reply, but he wasn’t going to over-analyse it.

He was going to try not to over-analyse it.

He was too tired, anyway, and still shaky from dreaming.

“Right,” he said, quietly.

Then he snuck out of the bedroom and down the stairs and out the door.

Getting out felt a bit more like being able to breathe. The cold air stabbed him in the chest when he breathed in.

When he breathed out, his breath came out in a white plume of smoke.

-

Jon met him outside the house. He was wearing a longer, thicker jacket this time. It looked nice. It looked _expensive._ There was a thick, dark red scarf wrapped around his neck.

He gave a small, tentative smile when he saw Martin coming down the road, shifted a little on his feet.

Martin swallowed. “Hey,” he said.

“Good morning,” said Jon. He jerked his head toward the gravel road. “ _Let us go then, you and I._ ” 

He said it in that higher voice again, like he was making a joke, except the words didn’t match his tone at all.

“Um,” said Martin, “sure.”

Jon gave him a long, considering look. It felt a little bit like being x-rayed, at least metaphorically speaking. Like Jon could read his emotions right off him, like he was an open book.

Which was probably fair.

He probably _did_ look pretty terrible.

“Are you all right?” Jon asked, voice soft.

“Yeah,” Martin said. He gave a self-disparaging little laugh. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“What happened?” Jon asked.

“I -” He wasn’t intending to say anything about it. He wasn’t. But it was Jon, and Jon had just spilled so many of his own secrets, had let himself be vulnerable, and - and it didn’t feel right, not returning that trust. It felt … ungrateful, maybe, or unfair. Martin swallowed. “I, um, had a dream about my mum.”

“Is she -?” Jon cut himself off mid-sentence, leaving the question hanging unfinished between them.

“She died in May,” Martin said.

Saying the words out loud was like a break in a dam or the bursting of a pipe or an aneurism, and he was so full of sense memory and bad feelings that he could burst, too, could fall into pieces and onto the floor like so much water, draining away until there was nothing left.

“She’d been sick for years, and the bills kept piling up, and I was planning to, to drop out? Get a job so I could help her, you know? But before I could actually do it, she got _really_ ill out of nowhere, and I, she spent a week at the hospital, and it almost looked like she was going to pull through.” He took a deep breath. “I stayed with her as much as they’d let me. Like, like maybe if I could just be _there_ for her, she’d get through it, you know?” He gave a small laugh that wasn’t. “It didn’t matter, obviously. She didn’t make it.”

It felt weird to say it out loud. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about it. It wasn’t like he could forget. But he hadn’t had to _say_ it to anyone before. Everyone who needed to know had already been informed, had already known, by the time he talked to them, and he hadn’t really _needed_ to tell anyone here.

So he just … hadn’t.

Not saying it had just felt, felt _easier_ , and now he couldn’t stop thinking about her, sitting in the kitchen and staring out of the window with that horrible, blank look in her eyes, or the smell of her perfume, the sound of her voice on the phone with friends, with a friend, rarer and rarer until all contact dried up, until there was no-one to talk to but Martin, and then her voice became harsh and dry like flowers withering in their waterless vase.

“Martin,” Jon was saying, devastatingly gentle, much more than Martin had thought he had it in him to be. “Martin, I’m sorry.”

And Jon’s hands were on his face, cool and careful, wiping away tears Martin hadn’t known he’d been crying.

“I’m sorry,” Martin said, half gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you,” Jon said. “What are you sorry for?”

Martin stared up at him. How could he answer that question? How could any answer be large enough to cover even a fraction of it?

He shook his head. “I don’t,” he said, helplessly. “Everything, I guess?”

Very carefully, Jon slid his hands down to rest on Martin’s shoulders, and then he pulled him into an awkward hug. “Is, ah, is this okay?” he asked. His scarf brushed against Martin’s cheek. It was softer than it looked, and smelled faintly of cinnamon and smoke.

“Yeah,” Martin whispered, throat raw. He closed his eyes and tried desperately to stop crying. “Sorry, I’m getting - sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Jon murmured. “It’s not your fault.”

Martin snorted wetly. “Don’t use my own words against me like that.”

Jon hugged him a little tighter. “Turnabout is fair play,” he murmured.

They stood there for a very long time.

Martin pulled back first.

“All right?” Jon asked, looking at him with a devastatingly soft expression on his face.

“Yeah,” Martin said. He couldn’t look away; found himself caught staring, suddenly starving, possessed by a different kind of hunger that sang through him in the beat of _touch_ , and Jon’s mouth was half open and his eyelashes were so long, and his eyes were dark, and his mouth was -

His mouth was -

Martin didn’t make a conscious decision to kiss him.

But he was kissing him nonetheless, a quick firm press of lips before he could tell himself not to.

Jon’s mouth was cool, and softer than Martin had thought it would be.

And -

Jon was standing very still.

_Oh._

_Oh no._

Martin pulled back, wide-eyed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m - was that okay?”

“I, ah, um,” Jon stuttered. He blinked, once, twice, like he wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. He cleared his throat once, and then twice. “That was okay.”

Slowly, a smile was stealing across his face. It was like watching the sun rise. 

“Okay,” Martin said. “Okay. Good.”

Then he kissed him again.


	8. Chapter Eight

He was back at the hospital, sitting stiffly in a chair that was slightly too small to be comfortable. He was sitting and he was watching his mother’s hospital bed, but it was turned so that the only part of her he could really see was her hand, resting skinny and blue-veined on top of the white hospital duvet.

He couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop looking at it, because if he looked away, something terrible was going to happen. Her nails were painted a beige kind of pink, and he couldn’t look away.

"Oh no," Jon said, from behind his shoulder.

Martin didn’t look at him.

He _couldn’t._

“Martin,” Jon said, very softly. “Let’s go outside for a bit?”

“No,” Martin said. “I have to stay, I have to -”

He twisted in his seat, trying to see his mother’s face, but there was a cloud in the way, soft and pale grey and spreading slowly outwards, spilling like water over the pillow and the duvet and onto the floor.

“No,” Jon said. He took Martin by the shoulders and crouched down in front of him, eyes wide, mouth thin with worry. “You - you don’t have to stay, Martin. This isn’t real.”

Martin blinked at him. He felt himself unstick, just a little, from the hospital room around him.

Jon was leaning very close -

_Jon?_

“Jon?” he asked, frowning. “Why are you here?”

Jon went very statue-still.

He looked somehow _sharper_ than the rest of the room. More present.

“Is,” Martin said. He swallowed. He had a hunch, and it was stupid, but - if he was wrong, no-one but him would know, so he might as well ask. “Are you really here?”

Jon gave him a disgruntled cat look. “That depends on what you mean by _really here_.”

Which felt like an answer in itself.

“Jon -”

And then he was staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom, alone.

-

The café was as crowded as it always was, which was to say, it was nearly empty. Martin ordered a tea from Eileen and tried to think of ways to say “ _were you in my dream last night”_ without sounding like … well.

It was hard to find a good way to start that conversation. That was all.

The moment he sat down at the table - what he thought of as _their_ table at this point - Jon launched into a rambling speech about Shakespeare's wordplay, words coming fast enough that Martin was unsure if he was breathing properly. Tangents weren't exactly unusual for him, but there was a certain _energy_ to this one that made the entire forty minute digression feel a bit panicked.

"Were you in my dream last night?" Martin asked, with all the tact of a bull in a glass museum, once he could get a word in edgewise.

Jon went as still as he had in the dream. The brightness drained from his face. It hurt to see it, somehow, but he couldn't not ask - he had to _know._

"You were, weren't you," Martin said.

Jon sighed into his untouched cup of coffee. The surface of the liquid rippled like tiny waves.

"... yes," he said, finally. His voice was very small.

"So is this your," Martin gestured vaguely with his hands, "vampire thingie?"

"Vampire thingie," said Jon, flatly.

"You know!"

"I," Jon said, and, "yes."

"Which is … dream … walking?"

"It's more complicated than that," Jon said. He made a sour face.

"Okay, well, complicated _how_?" Martin asked.

"Sometimes, when people tell me … things that are emotionally, ah, resonant? I end up in their dreams," Jon said. "But I don't know how to control it. And - and I'm sorry for not telling you, Martin." He gave a dark little half-laugh that wasn't. "Just hoped it wouldn't be an issue, I suppose."

Martin drank his tea and sat with that for a bit as Jon picked at an uneven bubble of plastic at the edge of the table.

"Could you maybe tell me about it in advance if any other vampire stuff comes up?" Martin asked. It came out sharper than he wanted it to. "I'm not _angry_ , I'm just -"

"Disappointed?" Jon said, like he found it funny.

"It's not funny," Martin muttered, because it wasn't. "I just … I can't do anything if you keep me in the dark."

"I know," Jon said. "I know. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry I invaded your dreams like that-"

"That's okay," Martin said. "You … actually, it kind of helped. Having you there. Just, um, if you have any mindreading powers or anything -"

"I don't."

"Okay, good," Martin said. "But if you _did_ , I'd appreciate it if you stayed out? Other than that, though, I think you're probably-"

"The first time we met, I wanted to eat you," Jon said. Then his mouth snapped shut and his eyes went wide, darting around the room.

" _What_?"

Jon winced. "I have it under control now."

"You - _now?"_ Martin sputtered.

"It's just -" Jon said, and then faltered a bit before continuing. "You smell so good, and I wasn't prepared for it. And I have, ah, dealt with it, and I am used to the - I'm used to it now."

He looked contrite enough that Martin almost wanted to let it go, which was probably a sign that he was too far gone already. In for a penny, in for a blood-sucking pound, and all that.

"So, what, you went to vampire therapy for a week? That's why you were gone?"

Jon snorted. "I wish," he said. "I only … switched diets."

Martin made a face at him. "What does does that mean?"

"It's normally - Elias supplies us with blood from, ah, hospitals? But it's … dead, in a spiritual sense. You can sustain yourself on it, but it's - imagine filling a well with a thimble."

"And - then?"

"You know this one," Jon said.

"Animal blood," Martin said.

"You could think of it as a bucket for the well." Jon picked at the plastic of the table. "Elias gives us the choice of how we deal with our needs as long as we’re … discrete. No human deaths. Nothing that’s traceable."

Martin suppressed a shudder. "Right."

"It's." Jon sighed dejectedly. "We should start working."

"Right," Martin said again. "Right, right, yeah."

He pulled out his notebook. They got to work.

-

On Sunday night, a middle aged man was found drained of blood at the edge of the town square. Martin’s dad mentioned it when Martin came down for breakfast on Monday morning. He made some broad comments to fill the silence between them, _this isn’t the kind of town where this stuff happens_ , and Martin nodded and made sounds of agreement and felt sick to his stomach.

-

“There’s been another one,” Sasha said at lunch, with an uncomfortable intensity. She took a long, meaningful drink of water.

“And?” Martin prompted, because she clearly wanted the excuse. She gave him a short little nod, like she appreciated it, and put the glass down with a clink.

“ _So_ , looks like it might be some kind of burgeoning serial killer, right?”

Martin looked down at his sandwich. He felt a little sick. “Maybe?”

“ _Definitely,_ ” Sasha said. “Who do you think it is?”

Helen was sitting at the Bouchard table. Michael and Annabelle were laughing at something she’d said.

“I dunno,” Martin said, because Sasha still seemed to want a response. “I don’t really know anyone here, so it’s not like I’d know anyway, you know?”

Sasha sighed. “All right, fine, you’re right. Tim, what do you think?”

Tim shrugged, mid-peeling a clementine. “The whole sexy private detective thing is your brand, Sasha. Don’t want to steal your thunder.”

“Yeah?” she said. “What’s _your_ brand, then, Tim?”

“Respectable gentleman,” he said. Martin and Sasha sent him twin doubtful looks. “Okay, fine, I'm the golden retriever in human form, how’s that?”

“More like a macaw,” Sasha said under her breath. Martin laughed.

“ _Hey,”_ Tim said, “I resent that -”

Then Jon slid into the seat next to Martin, and the table went very quiet.

“Hello,” said Jon. He pressed his thigh against Martin’s under the table, and Martin felt something loosen in him, like he’d been holding his breath all day and only now was able to stop.

He wanted to lean into Jon’s side, to kiss him, to tuck his head into the crook of Jon’s neck and take his hand and get lost in _being_ there, just breathing -

“Um,” said Sasha.

“Hi, Jon,” said Martin, and settled for smiling at him.

“How was class?” Jon asked him, leaning further into Martin’s personal space. If Jon’d had any body heat to spare, Martin thought, he’d be close enough for Martin to feel it on his skin. His eyes were soft, but there was a hint of tension in his jaw, a bit of anxiety written out plain in the slight furrow between his eyebrows.

Martin shrugged. “It was fine,” he said, “Helen was very … cheerful.”

“Hmm,” said Jon. He tapped his fingers against the plastic bench they were sitting on. “Let me know if you need any help with, ah, the homework.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “Are we just not going to talk about this?” He gestured broadly between Martin and Jon.

“Talk about what,” Jon said, stiff and clipped and not like a question.

Tim ignored him. “Martin, I thought you kind of hated this guy?”

Jon chuckled, but didn’t say anything, leaving any kind of explanation to Martin, which. Fine. _Fine_ , yeah, Tim was asking _him_ , so of course he’d have to be the one to answer, but it was - he was blushing hard enough for it to hurt.

“Um,” he said. Jon was smirking at him, this horrible, smug little thing. Martin shot him an ugly look in return. “Yeah, it’s, um, it’s kind of a thing?”

“Holy shit,” said Tim.

“Oh my God,” said Sasha.

Martin cleared his throat. “Anyway, the murders?”

Jon awkwardly patted his knee under the table.

“No, actually,” Sasha said, leaning in, “how _did_ this happen?”

“ _For never was a story of more woe_

 _than this of Juliet and her Romeo_ ," Jon said.

Martin shoved him. “You’re the worst.”

Jon grinned at him. “Thank you, Martin.”

“Holy _shit_ ,” said Tim and Sasha, all at once.

-

**Jon:** Are you busy on Saturday?   
  
**Martin:** no plans :)   
  
**Jon:** Come to London with me.   
  
**Martin:** seriously?   
  
**Jon:** There is someone I want you to meet.   
  


-

“So what are we doing here, anyway?” Martin asked, slightly out of breath. Jon was walking just a little too fast, and he kept having to break into a short jog to catch up. They were a few streets away from Hammersmith station. The day was cool and sunny; light reflected in Jon's hair as they walked, bright like fire or stars in the night sky. It made Martin warm all over, made him think horribly poetic things he tucked away for later.

"We're meeting Agnes," Jon said. He slowed down, stopped squinting at street numbers for a moment to face Martin completely.

"What?" Martin asked, with a sense of foreboding.

"Listen," said Jon. He put his hands on Martin's shoulders and squeezed gently, just enough for Martin to feel it. "This is going to hurt, but I need you to trust me."

" _What?_ "

"It's a - a preventative measure," Jon said. "Like a vaccine, in a sense."

"Right," Martin said dubiously.

"Trust me," Jon said. "Please."

Martin sighed. "Right. Fine. Let's go."

Jon led him down another crowded street, stopping outside of a small café. It had white brick walls; the door and window frames were made from bright blue wood. Brass flowerpots hung from the eaves, overgrowing with pale orange flowers. A sign above the door read, in flowy, looping cursive,

**_The Dutchman_ **

“Here we are," Jon said. He took Martin's hand and squeezed it reassuringly, which was the opposite of reassuring. Then he opened the door and walked inside, pulling Martin along with him. Once they were inside, he dragged Martin with him to a table by the window. A woman was sitting there already. Her back was to them, but she was wearing a soft-looking charcoal sweater and her long, dark red hair hung loose around her shoulders.

“Agnes,” Jon said to her, and sat down across from her. Martin sat down next to him, a little sweaty and a lot awkward.

Agnes gave Jon a small smile. “Jon,” she said. She was holding a steaming cup of coffee. “And who’s your friend?”

Jon glanced at Martin. “He’s my - ah, Martin.”

“I see,” said Agnes. “Hello, Martin.”

“Um, hi,” Martin said. He wondered when the pain would start, and what it was going to be. He had the feeling it wouldn't be small talk. And -

He probably shouldn't trust Jon.

He _definitely_ shouldn't trust Jon, probably.

But.

But he trusted him anyway.

It wasn't a conscious decision. It came to him as natural as breathing.

They talked for a little while - Agnes and Jon, mostly, and most of it catch-up-talk, small back-and-forth updates Martin couldn't attach much meaning to, but which was nice enough to listen to.

Eventually, the conversation petered out.

"Is it time, then?" Agnes asked, looking straight at Martin.

"Um," Martin said. "I - yes?"

“Alright," Agnes said. "Give me your non-dominant hand."

Hesitantly, he reached out his arm, resting his hand palm up on the tabletop.

Agnes leaned forward.

“Now,” she said, like she was going to tell him something important. Instead, she pressed her thumb into the flesh of his forearm, digging into the meat of it -

and it _burned_ , spreading out across his skin in lines like a feather, like lightning, like ice.

“ _Ghk_ ,” he said, pressing the sound out through his teeth.

Agnes let go, leaning back in her seat. She smiled at him.

It wasn’t an entirely nice smile.

“Just a reminder,” she said.

“Of wh-what?” Martin asked shakily.

“You’re getting close to vampires, poking at murder cases? People notice.” She glanced briefly at Jon before looking back at Martin. “You’re playing with fire.”

Jon made a small, strangled sound that sounded almost like a laugh.

 _“Seriously?_ ” Martin asked him.

“Sorry,” said Jon. “Sorry, it’s just-”

“Yeah, okay,” Martin muttered. Gingerly, he touched the fingerprint burn on his arm. It hurt, as he’d known it would, but he couldn’t leave anything be, could he? “So this was about what, intimidation?”

Agnes tucked her hair behind her ear. “Some of our siblings have powers that mess with your head. That,” she nodded at his arm, “should help you resist it, at least a little.”

And that was good, probably.

If it was true - if it was true, it was probably for the best.

That was an uneasy thought in itself.

-

They were quiet for most of the journey home. The thumbprint on Martin’s forearm had healed too fast for it to be natural, until it looked like a scar he’d had for years, like some half-forgotten childhood accident. The sun set through the train window, blazing across the landscape outside like wildfire, and was completely gone by the time they got on the bus from Gloucester. Jon’s eyes reflected cat-like in the evening traffic, unblinking.

Martin couldn’t stop looking at him, either. His chest felt tight, ribs squeezing at the softer stretch of his lungs.

He didn’t have a good name for the feeling.

It wasn’t sadness, exactly.

It was just -

Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Jon in the half-dark, he couldn’t shake this sense of slowly rising doom. Of tragedy oncoming.

“Are you happy?” he asked, without meaning to.

It sounded accusatory. Passive-aggressive.

Martin swallowed.

Jon made a small, surprised sound at the back of his throat. “In general?”

“I,” Martin said, and then stopped. “Yeah.”

Jon hmmed thoughtfully, like he needed to consider it carefully. He shifted so that they were face to face. “Moderately?”

“Do you … do you remember the last time you didn’t have to qualify it?”

“Do you?” Jon asked.

It hurt.

He hadn’t expected it to, but it _did_ , turned back on him like a mirror, cutting close like a knife.

He couldn’t stop the nervous laugh from bubbling up in his throat, but Jon just watched him, steady, quiet, waiting.

“That’s not fair,” Martin told him.

“I’m not sure,” Jon told him. “Things before I was turned are … somewhat hazy.”

Martin didn’t know what to say to that.

“You know,” he said instead, “before I moved here, I would have thought being a vampire would be a lot-”

“More glamorous?”

“Sexier,” said Martin.

Jon did a whole three part shudder-shuffle away from him, and shot him a deeply offended look.

“Well, obviously I don’t think so _now_ ,” Martin said.

“Well, _good_ ,” Jon said, and then continued, quieter, “and you should know, since we’re, ah, well … you should know that I don’t … do that sort of stuff.”

“What, walking around in a very open shirt on the prowl for virgins?” Martin joked. At the look on Jon’s face, he gave him a small, reassuring smile. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

Jon frowned at him for a moment longer before turning away, sighing. “All right. Just so you’re aware.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Hm.”

Martin picked at the edge of his sweater.

“I don’t know,” he said, after a long pause. He felt Jon shifting next to him, could feel his attention on him. “To answer your question. I don’t know.”

Very gently, Jon took his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His hand was cool against Martin’s; as Martin watched, he intertwined their fingers.

“We say that a lot,” Martin said stupidly, staring at their hands. He liked how they looked, locked together like that.

“I’m - sorry about that too, I suppose,” said Jon.

Martin squeezed his hand. “I’m not sorry about - about this, though. I don’t want you to be sorry about this.”

Jon leaned his head on Martin’s shoulder, carefully, like he was ready to move away the second Martin told him to.

“I’m not,” he said, voice a little rough. “I - I couldn’t be.”


	9. Chapter Nine

On the day of the presentation, Martin and Jon holed up in the library for lunch to go over their notes one last time. Even after the test runs they’d already had, Martin still found himself getting … a little flustered, maybe. There was just something about Jon, giving a performance. How he weighed out the words, how every syllable held meaning. The way his eyes shone as he brought home a point.

“You’re brilliant,” Martin told him, as they packed up their things.

Jon ducked his head, like being a dreamwalking vampire was just an everyday sort of thing but no-one had ever told him he was good at reciting a script.

Which -

Wasn’t that unlikely with Jon, Martin supposed.

“You too,” Jon said quietly, so tender it made Martin feel a little bruised, in a good kind of way. He leaned over and kissed Jon very gently on the cheek.

“That’s for luck,” he murmured.

Jon hmmed and hugged Martin tightly in return. “This is for luck, too.”

-

In the end, they didn’t need luck.

Still, it was nice to have it.

-

**Jon:** You are invited to a family dinner on Friday.   
  


Martin squinted at the message, still half asleep.

“What?” he murmured.

As he watched, a new message ticked in.

**Jon:** Elias insists.   
  
**Jon:** I am sorry.   
  


“Right,” Martin said, snorting. He could think of few things he wanted _less_ than a family dinner with the Bouchards, but it would be a good opportunity to get some more information, at least.

He sighed, throwing an arm over his face.

He wondered how Jon would react if he said no.

He wondered how _Elias_ would react if he said no.

Not great, probably. He may not have met the man, but he didn’t sound like the kind of person who dealt with things not going his way all too well.

And … despite himself, Martin wanted to know what life in that house was like. He wanted to know what _Jon_ ’s life was like, if he fit in there, if his family was -

Right.

Martin picked up the phone and fired off a quick reply.

**Martin:** I'd be happy to :)   
  


-

On Friday evening, Jon met him on the gravel road. Martin had put on a dark blue turtleneck and enough anxiety to make his skin itch. He’d slipped a pocket knife in his pocket, too, which was probably overly fatalistic or overly optimistic about his own abilities to protect himself or both, but it did make him feel a bit safer, being able to feel the weight of it against his thigh.

Jon kept nervously straightening his sleeves and adjusting his scarf.

“Hi, Jon,” Martin said, smiling at him.

“Martin,” Jon said. He looked as though he would have sweated if he could.

… _could_ vampires sweat?

“How are you doing?” Martin asked.

Jon gave a dry little laugh. “I believe I’m the one who should be asking that question.”

Martin rolled his eyes. “Ask me later,” he said. “Right now I’m asking _you._ ”

“I,” Jon said. He stepped into Martin’s personal space and put a hand on his cheek. “I’ll be better once this is over with.”

“Really instilling me with confidence there,” Martin said.

“Yes, well.” Jon cleared his throat awkwardly. When he spoke again, it was with a new intensity. “Whatever happens today, I need you to stay calm. We’ll be able to get out eventually, but you will have to survive the dinner first.”

“ _Survive?_ ” Martin repeated. His voice went embarrassingly squeaky.

“Metaphorically speaking,” Jon said, and now it was his turn to roll his eyes, looking horrifyingly fond. Seeing that look on his face would have made Martin feel soft and goopy if it wasn’t for the whole “please come and have dinner with my terrifying vampire family” thing.

“Right,” said Martin.

“Martin,” Jon said, stroking his thumb along Martin’s cheekbone. “I need you to trust me. You won’t be in any danger if you promise me you’ll do that.”

“You - _fine_ ,” Martin said. “ _As usual_ , I’ll hold you to that.”

“They’re expecting - they all want to _talk_ to you,” Jon said, sounding a little ill. “If you feel in danger at _any_ point, you can call for me, and I’ll be there, and the mark Agnes gave you should protect you from the worst of it, but-”

“I’ll be fine,” Martin said. He hoped it was true.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” Jon said.

Martin wasn't entirely sure who of them he was trying to convince.

-

The Bouchard house was more of a mansion. It rose up from the trees like something from an old horror movie. Martin tried not to shudder.

“Ready?” Jon asked.

“Yeah,” Martin said.

Jon lead him inside, through a hallway that looked exactly like Martin had imagined, all oil paintings and dark wood, into a sitting room lined with bookcases. Everything looked carefully curated. It made Martin uneasy, like he might breathe wrong and ruin something. Annabelle was sitting on an expensive-looking couch, back straight, reading a paperback. She looked up when they entered and smiled pleasantly.

“Martin, is it?” she asked.

“That’s me,” Martin said, and immediately felt like an idiot.

Annabelle put down the paperback and stood up. She was wearing a black dress that looked like it cost more than his mum would have made in a month, back when she still worked.

“Took you long enough, Jon,” Annabelle said, still smiling.

“Hm,” said Jon.

“Now, Martin,” said Annabelle, looping her arm around Martin’s elbow and leaning in close. Even with her high heels, she still only reached him to his shoulder. “I think you want to be my friend, don’t you? I think you already trust me.”

And for a moment, he really _did_ trust her. There was nothing he wanted more than to be her friend. He smiled at her, and opened his mouth to say so.

Then pain, bright and clear and fire-hot, flared on his forearm.

It was like a fog in his head had lifted.

Annabelle was still smiling, leading him away from Jon. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”

“There’s not much to tell,” Martin said vaguely.

“Hm,” said Annabelle. She walked him back out into the hallway. “Well, I think you’ll tell me all about how you and Jon got together, hmm?”

The mark on his forearm gave another painful pulse, but he found himself distracted. “W-wait, he told you?” he asked. Something warm and pleased curled up in his gut despite himself.

“Don’t be silly,” Annabelle said, with a small laugh, like Martin was being an idiot but she didn’t want to say it strongly enough for him to realise what she thought about him. “Why do you think you’re here, Martin?”

“Right, yeah,” Martin said. “Um, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s really not for me to share.”

Annabelle gave him a long, considering look. “I see,” she said. Then she laughed again, but it was a different laugh this time, less polished. “Aren’t _you_ interesting.”

“Am I?” Martin asked warily.

Annabelle opened the door to a dining room. “Why don’t you go ahead, I need to have a word with Jon.”

“Um, okay,” Martin said, but she was already gone.

 _He’ll come if you call_ , he told himself.

He was faced with an absurdly long dinner table, even for a family the size of the Bouchards.

A short-haired Asian girl was setting the table, putting down plates and cutlery with a little too much force. She was wearing a dark blue dress and a mutinous expression.

She looked up and scowled even further when she saw him. “Oh, great.”

“You - Melanie, right?” Martin asked.

“Yep,” said Melanie, laying down a knife with a look that said she’d rather be stabbing someone with it. “And you’re Martin.”

“Yeah, that’s - that’s me,” Martin said, and then, because standing and watching and _not helping_ was quickly getting physically painful, “Do you want any help?”

Melanie sighed. “No, it’s fine. I’m almost done here, anyway.”

Martin stared at the plates and cutlery she had already lain out. 

“I thought you guys didn’t eat,” he said. “Um. Other than blood, I mean.”

Melanie laughed. “Sharp,” she said, as she began folding napkins. “You know how it is, Daddy Dearest loves to make us play at being a happy family whenever he has the chance.”

“So - so will you be drinking blood, or?”

“No,” said Melanie. “We’ll just be pretending to eat human food. Fucked up, right?”

_Oh no._

“Yeah,” said Martin weakly.

“Anyway, if you _really_ want to help out, Jane and Michael are in the kitchen. I don’t think any of them really knows how to make a salad.”

Martin thought about the worm basement and shuddered. Maybe if he could see the food being made, he’d feel a bit less nauseated about it.

Maybe it would just make it worse.

“Right,” Martin said. He hovered awkwardly. “Um.”

“Over there,” Melanie said, gesturing vaguely at a door at the edge of the room that was left open in a crack. “Go on.”

“Thank you,” Martin said, and went.

In the kitchen, Jane was wearing an apron over her dress, which was summery and yellow and patterned with bees. She was looking at a head of lettuce like she didn’t quite know how to approach it. Michael was sitting on the counter, feet dangling, humming a tune Martin wasn’t familiar with. He was slightly off-tune.

“Um,” said Martin, “Melanie said you might need help.”

“Martin,” said Michael. His voice had a strangely ethereal quality to it, and he was smiling, but that didn’t mean anything. Not here. Not in this house. “Lovely to meet you.”

“Yeah, uh, likewise,” said Martin. “Can I help you with the salad? Or … anything?”

“Chop this, if you would,” said Jane, leading him to the head of lettuce and handing him a disturbingly sharp knife.

“Sure,” said Martin, and chopped lettuce.

The next time he looked up, Jane was gone, and Michael was standing very close to him.

“ _Ah!_ ” Martin yelled, nearly dropping the knife on his foot.

Michael laughed, high and melodious and humming like a toothache.

“Jon really put us all to shame with this one,” he said. “I must admit, I’m a little jealous.”

“Um,” said Martin.

“Well, said Michael, “good luck!”

-

Dinner was painfully awkward. There were six of them and one of him, and there was so much food on the table that it made him a little sick. It was truffled pasta with serrano and bitter greens. The serrano was swimming in oil. He’d never had truffle oil before, but whoever had been in charge of the cooking was clearly a fan, because it drowned out everything else. He ate his portion, and tried not to think too hard about not eating food in fairy lands, and tried not to mix his metaphors too much, while Jon pushed around the salad on his plate. Every so often he’d glance over, mouth thin and anxious, and Martin would give him a strained smile in return. On his other side, Melanie was viciously stabbing at her greens, shredding them until they were practically confetti.

And at the head of the table was Elias, smiling magnanimously and asking Martin gentle, prying questions about his past that Martin dodged mostly by rambling hopelessly about whatever came into his mind. Jon hooked their feet together under the table and used any chance to derail the conversation with trivia and pedantry. Everyone else was quiet, quiet, quiet, and Elias kept asking questions, kept giving half-relevant and vaguely threatening anecdotes.

Then, after what felt like forever, it was over.

-

Jon walked him back home afterwards.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, at the gate to Martin’s dad’s house. “I’m sorry I left you alone for so long, Annabelle wouldn’t let me go.”

“It’s fine,” Martin said. He frowned. “I don’t feel like I got a good sense of who could have turned Helen. I mean, I don’t know about Jane, but both Annabelle and Michael are…” He trailed off in favour of gesturing vaguely.

“Extremely suspicious?” Jon asked.

Martin laughed quietly. “Yeah. It’s like they’re leaning into it.”

“Hmm,” Jon said. “With the two of them, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Do you think it could be both of them?” Martin asked.

“I don’t … _think_ so,” Jon said. He frowned. “They haven’t been the best collaborators, historically speaking. And I don’t want to risk anything with either of them until I’m _sure_.”

“Yeah,” said Martin. He sighed.

Jon pulled him into a tight hug. “I won’t let them harm you.” His voice went deep and rumbly and sure, sending shivers down Martin’s spine.

“Thank … you?” Martin said. “Trust me, this still wasn’t the worst family thing I’ve been to.”

Jon made a sympathetic sound, squeezing Martin a little tighter. The pressure of the hug was grounding. It made him feel … safe, maybe.

_Loved._

Martin closed his eyes and pushed his face into Jon’s neck. “If you still feel bad,” he mumbled, “I guess you can make it up to me by being my date to the Winter Formal.”

“I suppose I can,” said Jon. He kissed Martin awkwardly on the side of his ear. Martin could feel him smiling.

Quietly, it began to snow.


	10. Chapter Ten

It was snowing on the eve of the Winter Formal.

Martin got ready with Tim and Sasha at Tim’s house, helping Sasha into her shimmery, silver-sequinned dress and letting Tim paint his nails midnight blue. He’d snuck his pocket knife with him, just in case.

Together, they stumbled through the icy streets to the school auditorium, which was already filling up with students. Inoffensive pop music played quietly from the speakers. Tables of finger food and off-brand soda lined the walls.

Before Martin could orient himself, Sasha grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward, yelling, “Jon!”

Which was when Martin saw him. Jon was standing in a corner, wearing a breathtakingly well-cut suit and frowning at a bowl of crisps like it personally offended him.

Something in Martin’s chest looped and tightened and tugged like a string.

“ _Jon!_ ” Sasha yelled again, cutting sharklike through the crowd.

Jon startled at the sound. When he saw them, his whole demeanour changed; the scowl melted off his face, leaving behind something soft and surprised and slightly unsure.

“Hello,” he said.

“You look great!” Sasha said, and then shoved Martin forward. He stumbled a step and a half forward, half-falling against Jon’s chest. “Here’s your Martin!”

“Ah -” said Jon.

“ _Sasha,_ ” said Martin.

But it was too late. She was already gone.

“Um, hi,” Martin murmured into Jon’s shoulder.

“Having a good night?” Jon asked. There was an amused glint in his eyes.

“It’s been alright,” Martin said. “How about you? Having a rivalry with the snacks?”

Jon made a pained face. “They’ve changed the recipe.”

“And that’s … a problem?”

“Only theoretically, I suppose,” Jon said morosely. Martin patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

“If you want, we can write a strongly worded letter about it,” he said. Jon laughed.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, leaning into Martin’s side. It made Martin feel warm all the way down to his toes. 

-

Martin was on his way back from the bathroom when Michael brushed past him.

“Helen says hi,” he said.

“What?” Martin said, turning to stare at him, but he was already gone. Martin was alone in the hallway with a horrible realisation.

“ _Michael_ ,” he hissed, pushing the door open to get back to the auditorium. He had to warn Jon.

Except -

He wasn't in the auditorium.

Instead, he found himself in a hallway. The walls were cream; the carpet on the floor was patterned blue and green and burgundy. There were mirrors and paintings and cupboards spread at even intervals down the hall.

It looked as though it went on forever.

“What-?” Martin managed.

This was wrong.

This was _wrong_ , and when he turned around to leave, the door wasn’t there anymore.

“ _Shit_ ,” he hissed.

“Language,” came Helen’s voice from down the hallway. As he watched, Helen climbed out of one of the mirrors. She was smiling very, very brightly.

“Helen,” Martin said, high-pitched. “How - what are we doing here?”

“Hello, Martin,” Helen said, delighted. “What a _fun_ question.”

“It’s a pretty straightforward one,” Martin said.

“Well!” Helen said, brushing off her clothes. She was wearing a black pantsuit with pastel pink and mint green pinstripes. It hurt to look at, and her heels looked deadly even at a distance. “ _I’m_ here to have a good time. And you, Martin, are here to make a choice.”

“Yeah?” Martin asked. There was a mirror close to him, and another low cupboard. A pair of two-pronged, wall-mounted lights. Farther down the hall, he could see a couple of high cabinets.

Nothing he could easily use to fight.

Nothing he could really use to get out.

“Now, Martin,” said Helen. “You are my friend. And I want my friends to be happy. And I couldn’t help but _notice_ that a certain Bouchard has caught your eye lately.”

“Um,” said Martin. “Y-yeah, it’s. We went here together, actually? He’s being really sweet.”

“Right!” Helen said, with a laugh. She began to walk toward him, slow and measured. It wasn’t as though he had anywhere to run. “So! I thought I would be a _nice friend_ and offer you a bit of vampirism to go with that vampire date!”

“I,” Martin glanced back up at the lamp above him. Maybe he should start carrying around a stake. “I think I’m good, actually. On the vampirism front. So maybe you could just let me out of here-”

Helen laughed again, louder this time. “Oh, very funny.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Martin said. He reached for the knife in his pocket and clutched it tight. It wouldn’t _do_ anything, he knew that, but it made him feel a bit more in control. Maybe if worse came to worst he could, could aim for the eyes or something. “I think you’ll want to let me go.”

“Hmmm.” There was a cold glint in her eye, visible even at a distance. “I think we both know I can’t do that, Martin.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Martin asked.

“Either way,” said Helen, “it really won’t matter to you soon, will it?”

Martin turned and ran.

The hallway stretched out in front of him, like a dream, like tar; no matter how hard he ran, the end seemed just as far away.

He looked back despite himself.

Helen was walking towards him. Her dimensions seemed to shift and warp as he watched, as strange and wrong as the space they were in.

“Why are you _doing_ this?” he asked, shoving one of the tall cabinets at her and stumbling farther down the hall, trying desperately to create some distance between them. The cabinet toppled and fell, spilling coffee table books and fine exhibition china as it went. Helen caught the top of it one-handed. He could hear the slow, steady splintering of the grain under her fingers from halfway down the hallway.

“Oh, Martin,” Helen said delightedly. “An excuse to _monologue?_ For _me?”_

She tossed the cabinet aside like it weighed nothing. It hit the wall with a crash, scraping up the wallpaper.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said, and began to walk toward him. She wasn’t in a rush. She didn’t have to be. “None of it. I had everything planned out … university, real estate, sensible shoes … and then I met Michael, and all of those plans went out of the window.”

She laughed. The sound filled the space around them like a physical thing, like a discordant chord from a badly tuned instrument.

Martin took another few steps down the hall. The end of it moved with him.

He thought about Helen on his first day, asking if he wanted to borrow her notes. Or later, looking nervous and twitchy and hunted.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

Helen laughed again. “Oh, don’t be! That’s what plans _do_ , don’t they - they change and twist and turn on you, and then you’re left - making the best of it.”

She took another step, and somehow the corridor shifted around with the movement, bringing her close enough that Martin could feel her breath on his face, sweet like honey.

“The thing is, Martin,” she said, leaning in, “it was a blessing. The old Helen really didn’t know how to have _fun_.”

“This is _fun_ for you?” Martin asked. “This - did - you _killed two people_!”

“What’s life without a little chaos,” Helen said. She patted him on the shoulder, hand heavy and ice cold through his dress shirt. “Change your mind yet?”

Her fingers dug into the meat of his shoulder, hard enough to bruise. For a split second, the world went strange and nonsensical around him, warping and twisting and making it hard to _think_ -

Then his forearm began to burn.

The searing pain of Agnes’ thumbprint washed over him, there and gone again.

He was left with a clear head and clear vision and Helen’s hand still heavy on his shoulder.

 _Trapped!_ the animal part of his brain screamed.

He tried to weigh his options, but it was hard to think straight under the stomach churning rush of panic. No pocket knife could protect him from this.

“I don’t,” he managed.

“Well.” Helen did a little shrug, and began to lean forward, eyeteeth lengthening. “Just wanted to double check.”

Martin punched out wildly with his pocket knife.

The blade caught her in the side of her open mouth, between the teeth - for a split second, her head snapped back. The knife went flying. Her hand fell away, and Martin stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet.

“That was _very_ rude,” said Helen. She looked irritated, now. Out of patience. “No more of _that_.”

Then she swooped down toward him. Martin pulled his arms up to shield himself -

And then she was on him, teeth tearing bright and awful into the skin of his wrist and _ripping,_ drinking -

Pain tore through him like a scream, blinding, and even as he tried to hold her back, he could feel himself faltering, vision blurring.

“Helen,” someone was saying, airy and ethereal but with an edge to it, now, “we have guests-”

Then a scream, and more pain, and the sound of bodies coming crashing through glass, and Jon’s voice was there, but he couldn’t _see_ , and everyone was yelling and then Helen _screamed_ -

And then everything went black.


	11. Epilogue

When he woke up, it was dark.

The room he was in smelled faintly of antiseptic, and for a moment he looked around for his mum before he realised that  _ he  _ was the one in the bed.

“Oh,” he managed.

_ Hospital room _ , his brain supplied. In the half-dark, he could barely make out a small bedside table and a couple of chairs. He did some quick mental inventory and found that his arm was aching and covered in bandages, but nothing else seemed to be  _ visibly  _ broken or injured. He just felt … exhausted.

But nothing more than that.

That was. That was probably good.

There was a shuffling sound from the corner, outside of his field of vision.

“Martin?”

And that was Jon’s voice, quiet and as tired as Martin had ever heard him.

“Jon?” Martin asked, squinting into the darkness. He wished desperately for his glasses. “What’s going on?”

“You’re okay,” Jon said, emerging from the darkness. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

“I,” Martin said, “yeah?”

Jon rushed forward and hugged him tightly.

“It was Michael,” Martin told him urgently. “Michael was the one who turned her.”

“I know,” Jon murmured. “I should have known sooner - after Helen got you, he came up to me and made -  _ jokes _ , I suppose. I didn’t realise until Tim and Sasha asked where you were, and at that point…”

“How did you find me?”

“... After I realised, I asked Jane and Annabelle for help,” Jon said. “They’ll probably use it against me, but I had to - I had to get to you before Helen could kill you.”

“She asked if I wanted her to turn me,” Martin said.

Jon made a face. “That’s -”

“Not for me,” Martin said. “I don’t want that.”

“Good,” Jon said. “That’s - good.”

“So,” Martin said, “what, you bullied Michael into getting into that hallway?”

Jon snorted. “If that’s how you want to put it.”

Martin laughed. “Makes it sound a bit less high stakes, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm,” Jon agreed. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired?” Martin leaned into Jon’s shoulder.

“That would be the blood loss,” Jon said.

“Yeah,” Martin said. He let go of Jon and sank back down onto the pillow. “Why did he do it?”

Jon sighed. “I think he wanted to make trouble for Elias? I didn’t really stop to ask, and by the time we got you to the hospital, they had already been dealt with.”

“Dealt with?” Martin frowned at him.

“They aren’t dead,” Jon said. “But it’s … complicated.”

“Okay, I will definitely ask you about that when I feel less like falling asleep,” Martin said.

“I’m … looking forward to it is a bit strong,” Jon said, “but we can talk about it some other time.”

“Good,” Martin said.

They lapsed into silence. Martin had almost fallen asleep when Jon spoke again.

“If you want to break up,” he said, “I understand. I almost let them -” he took a shaky breath “-I almost let her kill you.”

“Hang on,” Martin said, unable to keep from smiling. “Break up?”

Jon paled. “I, ah.”

“Are we  _ together _ ?” Martin asked. “Jon. Are you my boyfriend?”

Jon looked away. “If - if you want me to be.” He looked back up at Martin, meeting his eyes straight on. “If you want me to be, I would like nothing more.”

Martin pulled him closer; Jon let himself be pulled.

“I would love it,” Martin said, and his body was sore and his face was starting to hurt and he found, suddenly, that despite everything, he was happier than he had thought he could be just a year ago. “I’d love it if you’d be my boyfriend.”

“Okay,” said Jon in a small voice, and the look in his eyes was endlessly, desperately fond. “Okay.”

“Good,” said Martin. He couldn't seem to stop smiling. “I think you should kiss me now.”

Jon laughed, and did.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Please check out Endly's art post [here](https://endlydraws.tumblr.com/post/628180674868903936/had-a-blast-working-on-this-for-the-fic) \- including the world's cutest accompanying Martin!
> 
> Also, I used coding from CodenameCarrot and La_Temperanza's [How to Make iOS Text Messages on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845/chapters/14729722#workskin) for the text messages in this fic.


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